


(they stare at me while i) crave you

by akhikosanada



Series: Sylvix Week 2019 [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Camboy Felix, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Getting Together, M/M, Masturbation, Sex Toys, Sex Work, Strangers to Lovers, Sylvix Week 2019, Sylvixweek2019, Viewer Sylvain, background Dorogrid, background dimiclaude, forgive me seteth for i have sinned, i blame the sylvix discord for this, sylvain angst? in MY porn? more likely than you think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2020-12-16 11:33:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 48,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21035567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akhikosanada/pseuds/akhikosanada
Summary: "“Let’s set a goal,” he says, definite, like a death sentence. “10.000 tokens for the dildo only. 20.000 for the full experience, fake cum and all. Single bids only.”That’s a lot, Sylvain knows. 20.000 tokens are 1.000$, and even 500$ is too much for most if not all people on his livestream.Luckily, Sylvain is not most people."What better way to commemorate his barely-dead shithead of a father, Sylvain thinks, than to spend 0.01% of his inheritance money on the prettiest sex worker he has ever seen?Written for Sylvix Week 2019 - Day 3: modern au





	1. that boy's got my heart in a silver cage

**Author's Note:**

> Oftentimes, I find myself deeply wondering about the different paths that stretch out before me, oceanside footpaths carved towards sea and stars. One, two, three raindrops fall, cold and inexorable, as I rise from my earthy grave; step by step, I walk forward, the damp iciness of mud enshrouding my calves, my ankles, my feet. Here and there, some blades of grass surface and brush against my soles, return earth to earth and dust to dust in featherlight dark drops. Here I walk, to the crossroads, the oh-so-dreadful prospect of choice and future almost rooting me in place, I must not turn back, I must not cave under the weight of the heavens above, of the anchor inside my stomach -- yet the decision will not come to me until I feel a hand like a haunting, pushing me forward into the horizon, into that great grey sea.
> 
> Oftentimes, I find myself deeply wondering about the meaning of my life and the worth of my choices. This is one of those times.
> 
> here's felix fucking himself on a bad dragon

Pretty boys, Sylvain realizes, like pretty girls and pretty people in general, usually have pretty hands. Not this one.

He’s watching the dozens of blurry, tiny white scars curling like lace around whiter, deft fingers as the man on camera methodically cuts open the parcel on his coffee table and unwraps the silk paper around his newest acquisition with practiced precision. For a single moment, Sylvain feels as though they’re together in his room, face-to-face after a long day of work, the slow evening light fading away over their profiles and lighting their skin with a pale amber hue, breathing effortlessly in tune with each other’s.

For a single moment, Sylvain feels as though they’re alone, and not as though there’s a hundred more men like him staring at the exact same scene and imagining the exact same thing on the chatroom of a seedy porn site.

It’s easy to envision; it’s still fairly early, and there doesn’t seem to be as much traffic since the live cam is still titled as a simple _unboxing my new toys_ , lowercase and all, no tags or token goals whatsoever - still, Sylvain is still here, has been here since the desktop notification came in, of _Hugo_ going live at the same time as any other Tuesday night. Sylvain knows it’s not his real name - every regular knows that, every non-regular with reasonable common sense guesses that, and the few, foolhardy assholes who try and speculate over his real-life name get banned immediately. His schedule is neat, businesslike: three times a week, from 9:30 to 1 a.m., Hugo _ belongs_ to them, and Sylvain hates that the man himself phrases it that way, as though he’s a trophy, a work of art hung on a pristine, digital wall, his sole reason for existing the scrutiny and appreciation of people probably too undeserving of real-life sex and relationships.

(That’s what Sylvain tells himself, because that’s probably what he is, too, both the work of art and the undeserving. He doesn’t dwell on it often.)

For a man with such a tight timetable and business sense, Hugo surprisingly makes himself sparse on social media; he never uses his premium Snapchat, and his Twitter account updates sporadically, with an Amazon wishlist for new accessories pinned at the top. He does publish some pictures, though - one is still etched into Sylvain’s mind, half a face in black and white and grey, the edge of teeth and a tiny smile against the side of someone’s cock, weighing heavy against thin lips. _He’s not my boyfriend_, Hugo had said during his livecam, with a roll of eyes Sylvain would like to now call familiar, but that did nothing to quell the surprising slow burn of jealousy in Sylvain’s lungs, and he had distracted himself with thoughts of himself against these lips and tongue and teeth and had come the hardest he’d had in months.

He resumes his analysis of Hugo’s hands and wonders what could have brought about the scarring - did he have an accident when he was younger, and now has the permanent reminder etched like embroidery into his skin? Does he get into too many fights? Does he have difficulty handling knives as he cooks his own meals, or are somebody’s prettier hands in charge of that? 

Do someone’s goodnight kisses cover them each night? 

He certainly isn’t the only one thinking of these scarred hands. He’s thought it before, about how he would do his best to learn the way the scars would feel around his neck, his wrists, his ankles, about the way they would twist deliciously around his dick, about the way he would trail his lips and tongue and spit all over them in absolute reverence and complete surrender. He sometimes wonders, though, if he’s the only one who imagines the fingers grazing his cheeks and caressing his hair and fitting in the spaces between his own.

It had been lust at first sight, now that he recalls, scrolling around aimlessly on a random livecam website in the hopes of quelling the thirst he still stubbornly insisted was a phase, at the time, another unregistered user watching with rapturous attention as a man with bundled-up dark hair fraying at the seams of his face let a vibrator pulse inside him to the encouraging sounds of digital money raining down the chatroom. He still remembers how Hugo, still nameless to him then, had managed to make himself come untouched, broken moans spilling from thin, bitten lips as come shot across his chest, his scarred fingers tracing featherlight touches on his softening cock as Sylvain milked himself for everything he was worth. He had come back, after that, time and time again, had watched Hugo fuck himself open over his own fingers, or suck on a plug he planned to try later, or stroke his dick tip to base to tip again - those pretty, dark amber eyes of his fluttering shut while Sylvain’s remained trained on the expanse of his flushed-up throat.

A few months in, Sylvain had registered an account, for no other purpose than to set up an alert each time Hugo came online. For all the time he had spent on gay porn once he had finally moved in the secrecy of his own flat, Sylvain had never watched anyone else on the website - only him, all dark hair and dark lashes and dark eyes, pretty in unicolor. For each subsequent show, he had become one of the first registered users to log into the chatroom, and one of the last ones to leave, watching Hugo’s unravelling from beginning to end. Sometimes, Hugo held simple, two-hour sessions, just like the one he watches today - the man opening parcels of new toys or care packages or lingerie that his richest viewers bought him from his wishlist, trying them on and out if they were lucky enough.

Sylvain is probably richer than most of Hugo’s viewers combined, yet he has never bought the man anything. He has never paid for a private show, either, although Hugo rarely does these - only, Sylvain has learned along the months, when he’s particularly tight on money for one reason or another; and then again, Hugo is never the one to initiate them, merely waiting instead for a viewer to offer, and either begrudgingly accept the gig or outright ban the offender.

Sylvain pays as little attention as Hugo, it seems, to the racy words and vulgar compliments appearing across the chat bar, instead focusing on the small box the man in the camera has just finally unpacked from his parcel. The rest of Hugo’s skin is blessedly unmarred and pristine, Sylvain observes as his gaze slides up his hands to his naked arms and chest. The man still has a pair of skinny jeans on, the band of midnight blue underwear peeking out in a subtle match of his hair. The ridges of his body Sylvain knows almost by heart, now, along with the exact way his collarbones dip below his neck when he tilts his head back, his toned muscles stretch and flex under the skin of his torso when he moves, his abs tighten and relax when he climaxes.

Sylvain, too, is half-naked, and for a tiny moment he relishes in finding yet another insignificant commonality between the two of them.

“Okay”, comes Hugo’s voice, rough and baritone, covering the sound of rain outside Sylvain’s window. “What the fuck guys.”

Hugo is turning the toy between his fingers, disgust and something like grudging interest overshadowing the indifferent expression he has worn until then. It’s_large _, with bulges and ridges along the black shaft dazzled in gold sprinkles, curving up nicely from what looks to be a suction cup base - that somehow has small _ spikes_ on it, Sylvain realizes. Hugo owns many toys, most of which Sylvain remembers like the lines on the palm of his hand, but he’s never owned something quite like this. Firstly, it’s almost pretty, as far as dildos go, sparkles shining in the light, the lack of realism in the shape making it more appealing than most other non-vibrating toys. Secondly, it has a clear tube coming out of the base, still tightly bound around itself with a twist tie, and the implication already has Sylvain’s cock harden in interest in the confines of his pants.

“Whoever thought it was funny to buy me a _Bad Dragon_ dildo,” Hugo says, even though a few of his regulars are still missing in chat because the show hasn’t exactly begun yet, “I’m going to fucking _kill you_.” There’s annoyance and a cold, tranquil anger in his voice, more than what Sylvain is already used to - it’s one of the things that made him come back: the brutality of his honesty and the spirit in his words and the sharpness of his tongue, as though there’s an actual, real human being behind the screen, with feelings and expressions and a story. It makes the whole thing more human, lightens the shame in Sylvain’s stomach and heightens the heat in Sylvain’s gut. He’s never been one for sweet-speaking mindless dolls.

“What,” Hugo asks, grabbing a small bottle of liquid hidden away in the parcel and tossing it a few times in the air, “you thought I’d try that for you, no questions asked? You filthy fucks.” His voice sharpens to a dangerous, teasing edge, and Sylvain wonders how it would sound as it sang like a blade against his carotid. He seems completely disinterested as he lets the toy stand on the desk and starts unpacking other parcels as people type-scream in the chatroom - _do it, wanna see you ride that, how much tokens_ \- and, like he has done three nights a week for the best part of the year, Sylvain, too, types something in the bar, although it’s not as crude, and doesn’t press send, doesn’t _dare_ press send, and erases the whole thing like the spineless coward he is.

He never paid Hugo anything, never even left a single token for his work - for good reason, too; he still doesn’t know how his father would have reacted to combing through his golden, miracle son’s accounts and noticing money spent on buying fake currency on a gay livecam pornsite. Still, nothing had ever prevented him from speaking to the man, even through something as impersonal as Arial 11-sized words in a chat box. This is a place where he’s not confined by any expectations of behavior or gender or age, where he can be mostly himself, where he can be nearly free. Yet he never spoke, and if Hugo had ever noticed him typing then erasing all the honeyed words and piquant compliments he intended to let out into the tiny world of the chatroom, he never mentioned it. He still logs in at the very beginning and logs out at the very end, at least, because that’s as much support for what Hugo is doing to him that Sylvain can muster to show.

Hugo has pulled out some pretty lingerie from another package, a red, lace-and-cotton teddy that looked thin and comfortable, the crimson of the cotton straps a welcome contrast to the pallor of his skin in the grey stormy light. It comes to him, for the first time, that they must live relatively close to one another, diverting his eyes from the screen for a moment to stare at the raindrops rolling down the glass windows of his soon-not-to-be flat. Then, Hugo pulls out another item of clothing, and the wild smirk that crosses his face sends shivers down Sylvain’s spine. This is not a bodysuit as much as it is a triangle of dark gossamer, linked to a silky collar by a long expanse of black ribbon tessellated with fake gems. Hugo will look so good in it, Sylvain thinks; he also thinks he would like to be the only person to ever see him wear such a thing, but the fancy is distant and better stashed away for later use.

Instead, Sylvain recalls another picture, one of Hugo kneeling up on his mattress, his reflection in a full-length mirror wearing nothing but a thin lace teddy and low-cut dark denim shorts fraying at the end, a single tattoo of a dagger held up by a jeweled ornamental garter curving around a muscular thigh._went out like this today_, he had captioned, and the mere realization that he might have been able to cross Hugo’s path and not notice settles hot-and-cold inside his chest like a sip of mint tea.

Sylvain wonders if he would have recognized him, for his frame and height and eyes, if not for what he likes to think of as Hugo’s trademark hairstyle. For how he likes to play around gender norms, Hugo has never, ever let down his hair, preferring to keep his long locks entwined in a bun at the top of his head or fastened into a high ponytail. It’s one of the numerous things Sylvain fantasizes about - how his fingers would feel brushing and creasing the silk out of it, what sort of noises would tumble out of Hugo’s lips as he pulled and ensnared it around his fist, which kind of scents Sylvain would breathe into his lungs and out his mouth as he buried his face in the spot behind his ear to fuck deeper into him.

The chatroom starts to fill up all the more, like the smoking room of a speakeasy after one too many drinks, the people in his virtual space urging Hugo to try the clothes on, to remove his jeans, to play with himself. Hugo raises a single, thin eyebrow at some of the more crudely-phrased comments and propositions, but doesn’t reply, a long finger lazily pulling loose the elastic band of his boxers - that is, until both he and Sylvain seem to spot a comment at the exact same time, because Sylvain is certain his own expression is mirrored on Hugo’s face at the moment:

_ well if it isnt my favorite emo boy. gonna try that new toy for us? _

“You guys really are hung up on that thing, huh.” Hugo’s voice is not surprised, but the mere fact that he has not outright banned the viewer for calling him that is testament to his actual interest in the toy, Sylvain has learned to decipher. There’s nothing Hugo hates more than being called pet names, and his regulars are well-aware that contravening the implicit rule has harsh consequences. He’s scrolling on his computer, Sylvain can guess, and some seconds after the video comes alive with the sound of music - and yeah, these are the exact songs Sylvain used to listen to in high school, pop-punk and emo rock and all. His gaze slides like silk on skin to the dildo still standing on his desk, and there’s the ghost of a smirk on his face that melts Sylvain’s insides like candle wax. 

“Why don’t you guys pay for it?”

Hugo’s voice snakes its way into Sylvain’s headphones and down his cock.

Already, the background music is drowned in pings and bells of tokens being spent on a non-existing goal, and Sylvain’s eyes, still transfixed on Hugo’s face, spot the skirt of a smileless snort kept hushed up and buried under the scarred hand he brings to his face. “You truly are_insatiable_,” Hugo says, looking directly ahead, at _ him _, and the stretch of the _s_ slithers along Sylvain’s shoulders, as though Hugo whispers it right in the crook of his neck. Sylvain wants nothing more than to hear the word addressed to him and only him for the rest of his life.

“Fine,” he finally concedes, a few dozen messages later, “but that’s going to be a chore. Have you seen the size of this thing? Plus,” he takes the small vial in hand, “I’m not even mentioning _ that _. Do you guys wanna see me covered in disgusting, fake cum so bad?” The noise that leaves his mouth is tinted with revulsion, but Sylvain knows better, as does probably every single person following the stream, and he listens to the touch of excitement sang in a concealed canon. “If you think I won’t squeeze you out of _ everything _ you have for this humiliation, you truly haven’t been paying attention.”

_ Yes_ses and _ Howmuch_es and mispelled _ Youresohot_s shoot up and down the chat box, and Sylvain wonders if Hugo revels in having that much dominion in real life - if he makes his partners beg for his favors and pay for their insolence. Sylvain wonders if he likes losing control. Sylvain wonders if he’ll let him be the one to make him lose it. Hugo’s fingers have slid ever-so-slightly lower under the waistband of his jeans now, pulling their way down, and Sylvain makes out the tiniest bit of ink from the twin tattoos he knows lie around his pelvis.

“Let’s set a goal,” Hugo continues, pretending really hard to seem uninterested now, “but I’m sure none of you are going to be able to reach it anyway.” To his credit, he does seem to ponder for a moment, probably considering which objective would seem both incredibly close and unattainable at the same time. 

“Okay, I’ve got it,” he says, definite, like a death sentence. “10.000 tokens for the dildo only. 20.000 for the full experience, fake cum and all. Single bids _ only _.”

Hugo’s fingers seem to slide over the keyboard as he changes the title of his livecam, blocking and banning the people who complain that it’s _ unfair _ and _ way too expensive _ and _ actual theft _ on the way, expression cool and bored. That’s a _ lot_, Sylvain knows. He knows, because he had wanted to buy tokens once, in the heat of the moment, before his mind had caught up on all the ramifications like invisible fissures on an ancient Grecian urn and he’d tidily put back his credit card inside his wallet. 20.000 tokens are 1.000$, probably Hugo’s rent or close, and even 500$ is too much for most if not all people on his livestream. The highest bidder, his username shining at the top of the chat box, has only ever tipped Hugo 582 tokens, and probably not in one single tip.

Luckily, Sylvain is not most people.

He surprises himself with how calmly his hand reaches inside the bag resting at the foot of his chair. He finds his wallet without too much difficulty, slides out his credit card with even less, clicks the small blue link under Hugo’s camera. The rain strikes a peaceful rhythm against the window as he shifts the pop-up window out of Hugo’s oh-so-appealing face, eyes never leaving the shape of the seemingly very smug, very satisfied man in the camera. 

What better way to commemorate his barely-dead shithead of a father and his newfound freedom, he wonders, than spending 0.01% of his inheritance money on his very own pretty sex worker?

Sylvain closes the pop-up window and clicks on the small token icon below Hugo’s camera, and the look on Hugo’s face is worth every cent spent on his body.

A sound like a waterfall of coins resounds, and there’s something like vulnerability flickering on his expression like the flame of a candle, as though he cannot quite believe he’s actually worth the money, worth the attention, worth the worship. His eyes, two almost-extinguished embers, seem to look through the screen and right into his own, in question and thankfulness and defiance. When Sylvain’s username replaces the one at the top of the board, Hugo almost looks offended. 

“So it’s the first time you even interact in my livestream and it’s for_ this_? I know you’re a long-time lurker, but it’s still fucking weird,” Hugo looks at his username, and his face twists in distaste, “ugh, _ Maneater420_.”

Sylvain cannot even feel irritated at the insult, because he’s too busy processing that Hugo somehow _ knows _ him.

He recognizes him, as far as recognition can go regarding someone who has always registered and watched but never spoken nor bought.

The thought makes his fingers act on their own on his computer keyboard.

_ sorry, i couldnt talk much before. its my way to thank u for ur work! _

Hugo’s eyes fly wide open, and it’s the cutest, most human expression Sylvain has ever seen on him. “Why are you even apologizing?” It’s more of a whispered exclamation of disbelief, but Sylvain’s trained eyes detect the hint of a flush climbing up his chest before it rises in a deep intake of breath, Hugo’s hand reaching up his temples and forehead as he exhales some seconds later. “You weren’t the one to buy it for me, were you?” 

There’s an underlying helplessness to the threat, and Sylvain is quick to answer: _ no, dont worry! and dont push urself if its too much for u! _ Hugo doesn’t answer right away, and his silences are not odd, but this one is somehow out-of-place, unusual, as though he doesn’t know what to say. So Sylvain talks again, like the idiot he is, a compensation for all these months waving soundlessly from behind the virtual window. _ ive been following you for a year today, so if you dont wanna do it, just take it as a late payment + interests ;) _

And Hugo laughs.

It’s not a laugh as much as it is a cackle, quick and graceless and mirthful, and it’s gone as soon as Sylvain hears it. For a moment, it feels almost daydreamt, fancied by his frenzied, lust-addled, infatuated mind.

“God, now I truly have to do it, don’t I.” Hugo looks only mildly conflicted and very much calculating as his gaze falls half-lidded in direction of the toy, and God if it doesn’t send goosebumps crawling down Sylvain’s arms as he lazily slides down the zipper of his pants. “Well, I guess you do deserve a reward. For a year well _ spent_.” He makes a show of grazing his index finger against his lower lip in mock-reflection. “What do you think, everyone?”

Sylvain is absolutely_ living _ for the jealousy and respect he can see permeating the incoming messages across the chatroom, and he feels like spending these 1.000$ has been the best decision he has ever taken in his life. Not that it’s hard, for Sylvain has neither been nor pretended to be an expert in healthy decision-making, but he is the type of person to be grateful for small victories and graces.

“Good. Give me a name,” Hugo orders, and through the onslaught of random names popping up on-screen Sylvain knows it’s directed at no one else but him, and it sets his lungs and gut and heart on fire.

_ Sylvain_, he types.

Hugo snorts. “Oh my god, you gave me your real name, didn’t you?” His slim fingers thumb and tease at the zipper of his jeans like they would piano keys. “You’re so stupid.”

_ It’s because you drive me crazy_, he thinks and fills out in the chat bar, and erases immediately. He’s still a coward, after all this. He wills the shame off him as he does his own pants.

“I’ll have to get ready, though. This,” he grabs the toy in his hands, and it squishes under the pressure, “is _ big _ . And I need to wash it, since it’s fresh out of the package. So you guys be dears and stay fucking _put_ while I take care of this.”

He comes back a few minutes later, toy in hand, plastic tube unbound, jeans off. The two tattooed revolvers peek out deliciously from under his boxers, and Sylvain wants to lick the shape of the engravings until his mouth remembers each of the lines. He sits on the edge of his bed, a little more in the back, and the smooth grey blanket crinkles as he makes himself comfortable, small fairy lights blinking in the faded evening chiaroscuro, a small piece of paper in hand.

“Sorry, I have to actually read the instructions,” he answers Sylvain’s unuttered question with a roll of eyes, as though reading his mind, “since it’s the first time I’m actually going to try using - oh my god, they do call it a fucking _ cumtube_. Disgusting.” Hugo uncaps the small bottle in his hands, and dips a knuckle in. The cum-like lube stretches out as he pulls his hand back, sticky and stringy, and it looks nasty and lewd and incredibly arousing as it webs milky white around his fingers. He slowly, slowly, puts a digit to his mouth, and _ sucks_.

Sylvain hardens instantly.

Hugo’s eyes, almost blazing in the low light, flick to the camera, looking straight at them, at _ him_, as he tastes the substance, his tongue drifting and dipping down to lick it all off, to take the finger in to the second knuckle, before pulling out with a quick, wet sound.

“Doesn’t taste like anything,” Hugo says, and Sylvain wonders if he’s disappointed. He walks back to the desk, drops the open bottle, before reaching for a syringe hidden inside the toy box. He looks uncertain, somehow, as he looks back at the camera, that analytical spark in his gaze flickering in and out like the half-dead fairy lights above his mattress. “I should probably move the camera if I want to fuck this properly. Sorry, it’ll shake around a little.”

Hugo replaces the camera closer to the ground in a smooth, high-angle shot, testing different angles and different tripod heights as he goes along, his face zooming farther and closer and farther again,_ I knew it was a good idea to go wireless_, and Sylvain almost feels like he’s in the company of a close friend, of an almost lover. His hands work the tripod and the lens zoom, swift and experienced, and Sylvain wonders whether his day job also involves camerawork. It feels nice, he ponders, seeing Hugo less methodical, less assured, less guarded. His misplaced pride wants to insist it’s because of him, although he’s pretty certain he’s wrong. Another fantasy to keep locked in, the key thrown out and flushed down a gutter in the night rain.

Hugo tilts the camera one last time in direction of the bed, and sits back on the mattress, slow and almost coy. “Let’s start slow, as usual, yeah? You know the prices.” He toys with the band of his boxers as the requests and token tips trickle in the chat box, his fingers barely dipping under, skimming over the jut of his hipbones. He grazes invisible fingerprints lower, over the tattooed dagger at his thigh and the ornamental lace, his amber eyes the only color in sight. The hand trails up and up and up, barely skimming over the front of his underwear, but his eyes still flutter shut in the prettiest swipe of lashes. Sylvain mimics the movements on himself, as though trying to commit to memory what exactly makes Hugo bite his lip and shiver and tilt his head back, as though he would one day have to do all of this himself. Hugo hums, a low, purring sound. “You guys make… interesting points.” His finger traces the invisible length of his cock under the cotton, and he lets out the barest of hisses. “Why don’t we ask our benefactor of the night for his input?”

There it is again, this smirk ghosting across his sharp features, and Sylvain wants to say a dozen and more things - _ touch yourself, put these fingers in you, come right here and sit on my cock until you won’t want to even walk anymore_.

He settles for a very simple _ undress, please_.

“So polite.” Hugo’s smirk turns positively feral as he obliges and slides his boxers down the long, long line of his legs. He’s half-hard from just his simple teasing, and Sylvain still wonders, a year later, if he’s ticklish, if he could one day know all the secrets Hugo’s body hides so well just with hours and hours of careful observation. Sylvain grabs himself through his half-opened pants and his underwear, runs a tentative thumb along the bulge there, not yet daring to fully take himself in hand. His other hand is shaky as he types in a joke, his brain is short-circuiting as he presses _ enter_.

_ what can i say, i kiss my mother with that mouth ;) _

Hugo puffs out a short laugh, eyebrows rising in disbelief. “I wonder,” he says, fingers teasing along his dick, base to tip, “what else it is you kiss, _ Sylvain_.”

Sylvain only has so much self-control, and so he pulls himself out and strokes once, hard and earnest. His knuckles slide exquisitely against the barbells pierced along the underside, up and down that ladder to ecstasy, that tiny act of concealed, confidential rebellion he enacted when he turned twenty. There’s precum beading at the tip of his cock already - and it must be the absolute delirium in which he’s been stuck for ten minutes now, but he’s truly certain that no one ever has or ever will do what Hugo is doing to him. The breath he exhales is hot and wet in the air. _ For you? Anything_.

Hugo’s eyes shoot close again as he wraps these long, scarred fingers of his around the ridge of his tip and pulls down once, slow and deliberate. His strokes are carefully paced, working himself harder as comments flash onscreen and money is dropped in his virtual wallet. He answers some of them, gives thanks for the more important donations, and trails his hand up and up and up again until they reach the edge of his mouth. His short nails tease the pulp of his lower lip, before they sink into the warmth along his tongue, and Sylvain can see it work circles into the scars as he sucks on his own fingers. Sylvain can almost picture his own hand in place, the tip of Hugo’s tongue tracing the shape of his fingerprints, burning eyes clouded with lust looking straight at him as though to devour everything Sylvain’s ever been sure turned him on before they met. Slick spit dribbles along Hugo’s fingers and collapses down his collarbone, and he traces it down along his chest and stomach and right between the two tattoos on his pelvis. The other hand relaxes and releases, his cock now to its full hardness, flushed pink and curving towards him. 

Some nights Hugo spends entirely edging himself to a big finish, all fleeting touches and subtle strokes and tightening fists. As Hugo simply reaches inside a nightstand drawer Sylvain knows lies to the side, he ascertains it is not one of these nights.

“I just can’t get over how big it actually is,” Hugo says as he uncaps the new bottle of clear lube. “I’ll need to prepare myself a lot. I hope you’re happy.” 

The comment is rough with annoyance, and Sylvain is almost tempted to apologize all over again, but he has also not been this close to actual happiness for years, and so he chooses to answer in earnest: _ very much so. thanks again for doing this_

“God, you’re probably the most sentimental viewer I’ve ever had.” Hugo warms up a bit of lube between his fingers, before taking himself in hand again, and his mouth unintentionally falls half-opened. “Is is fun, watching me torture myself? Anything that’ll make you happier?”

There’s an earnestness behind the bite in his question, Sylvain deciphers, and he decides to echo the rest of the comments flooding the chatroom to the side of the camera.

_ you could put these fingers to good use. _

“I-is that so,” Hugo sighs, as he takes more lube and trails the coldness along his inner thighs. He’s sitting almost at the very edge of the bed now, propped up on one elbow, his hard cock left neglected as it contracts along his stomach. It’s somewhat long, but surprisingly thick, thicker than what Sylvain would have expected from someone with his build, and the contrast makes it even hotter. A digit circles right below his balls before sliding up and down his hole, teasing the muscle there, and Sylvain strokes himself harder as Hugo sinks a knuckle inside. 

The loose strands of hair framing his face flow back as his head tilts up, white throat exposed as his finger pulls in and out, loose and wet. It’s not enough, Sylvain knows, and his assumption proves to be correct when Hugo slides a second finger along the other and scissors inside. 

“I kind of prepared myself earlier,” he admits, the messy bun at the top of his head falling back a little under its own weight. “As if I’d wait for you guys to tell me how to fuck myself.” It’s exactly what he’s been doing from the beginning of his show with Sylvain himself, but Sylvain would never tell him that in a million years, not when he’s fingering himself tantalizing and lazy, barely grazing against the spot inside him that Sylvain has seen make his eyes close and his back arch and his voice sing. He pulls out almost completely, before pushing in again in one smooth move of his wrist, and along his tongue glides a hushed moan. Sylvain’s grip is slack as he rubs his cock, the warm palm of his hand collecting the precum at the top and waxing down his length, his thumb drawing circles on the tip as it comes back up. 

He watches, bewitched, entranced, as Hugo opens himself up around his hand, precum pooling in the crook of his hips and down the revolver tattoos, fingers sinking almost to their base inside his ass, curling into the flesh, dragging out slowly with filthy wet sounds matching the rain outside. Hugo’s breathing is labored, and when he opens his eyes, the amber has become a sole halo of gold around blown-out pupils. Sweat that Sylvain wants to taste against his tongue trickles along his lips as he says “Do you guys think I can put in a third?”

Among the silent chorus of black-on-white _ yes _ filling up the chat box, Sylvain answers _ dont push yourself_.

“Is that a challenge?” Hugo scoffs, paying attention to him and him only, and the spark of fervor in his stare makes Sylvain moan out loud in the quiet of his bedroom.

His fingers withdraw only to gather some more lube and slide back in tandem, easy, before Hugo curls a third finger next to them and spears right through himself, again and again and again. His back arches in a curve worthy of a Renaissance painting, and the breathy moan that tumbles out of his mouth echoes right against Sylvain’s bones. Sylvain completely lets go of his cock, too afraid to come right there and then - there’s no way he’s not watching Hugo getting off and building up and falling apart to his words to the very end. 

_ you dont know how beautiful you look right now_, he types and sends instead, and he recognizes the exact moment when Hugo reads his words, because his fingers go fast and deep and he _ mewls. _

Hugo seems almost surprised at himself, his eyes opening wide again and his pace slowing while every other person in the chatroom praises him in turn, empty words they barely mean, Sylvain’s feverish mind insists, not as _ he _ means them. He slowly pulls the fingers out of himself, his hair sticking to his forehead with sweat, and returns to lazily stroking his cock back to its full hardness - and if Sylvain hadn’t seen him do the same thing so much these past months, he probably wouldn’t have noticed how rattled he looks.

“I’m ready,” is everything he says, before he stands again and settles to stick the toy to the wooden floor in front of the bed by its suction cup. His deft fingers tremble ever-so-slightly as they grab the bottle of fake cum and the syringe, and his expression is serious and diligent as he fills it up before inserting it at the end of the plastic tube. His mouth pulls down in a small frown, almost a pout, as though he’s busy considering the logistics of what he’s about to do, and Sylvain tells him again: _ you dont have to do it if you dont want to_.

Hugo rolls his eyes, but his smile is tiny and so very soft, softer than Sylvain has ever seen. “If it’s for you, it might be okay,” he says, and Sylvain thinks that his wildest dreams have come true. “Well, that depends on what you look like, so for now I’m reserving my judgement.”

Sylvain actually laughs, true and breathy, as he watches Hugo squeeze lube onto his fingers and stroke the surprisingly flexible black-and-gold toy, slowly oiling up the ridges and bulges with heavy caresses of his hands. People are hurling crass descriptions at him, of their height and age and skin color and dicks. Sylvain simply says _ im just a tall redhead with brown eyes_.

(It’s not true, not in the way he wants - he’s not_ just _ a tall redhead with brown eyes. He’s a former model and heir to a big company that he’ll resign from in the morning and closeted gay young man of 25. He’s hot enough for people to throw themselves at him but not hot enough for them to do it in the way it really matters. He likes to think of himself as kind and understanding and diplomatic, but he truly is selfish and cowardly and unworthy of everything Hugo gives him right now.)

Hugo raises an eyebrow as he positions himself above the dildo curving below him, slowly fingering himself again. “Funny,” he says, looking right through the camera lens and into Sylvain’s eyes, “that’s just my type.”

He gently pushes himself down on the toy, tip filling him as he rests his back against the mattress behind him, and Sylvain pushes his hand down on his shaft. 

“Fuck,” Hugo whispers, a little broken, a little high-pitched, “that’s_ so big_.” The muscles in his thighs and legs shift underneath his skin as he rises up, the dildo almost sliding out entirely of his hole, before sinking onto it again in one smooth, hungry motion. Sylvain bites his lip so hard he almost draws blood. Hugo is a third down the length, the ridges opening him apart as he moans and sighs, voice rough and smokey. He opens his eyes again, and he looks positively savage, sharp canines biting and pulling along his lip, as he removes his right hand from its secure spot on the floor and trails it up the silicone of the toy, his middle and ring fingers spreading the space between his ass cheeks in order to help him reach deeper inside.

He comes back up again, slow, before slamming himself down again harder, once, twice, thrice, and the fourth time his hand reaches for his cock, his thumb playing with the precum at the tip as he reaches halfway down the thick toy.

His head falls back, prettily, and Sylvain finds it so easy, to dream himself pulling Hugo apart instead of the dildo, to sink his own cock deep inside his hole, tight and wet and warm. He can almost feel it, his tongue tracing shivers over his long, pale neck, marking there with a bite of lips and a brush of teeth, unvoiced proof of the word _ mine_. He watches the way Hugo touches himself, hard and slow, pleasure a liquidless chaser of the burn inside him, and when the toy pushes particularly deep Sylvain can witness the full-body shiver Hugo’s rewarded with as though he was skin to skin with him.

“Y-yes, there,” Hugo whines, tenor and melodious, and Sylvain strokes his own cock in time with Hugo’s thrusts, as though fucking him himself, “fuck, so good, Sylva-_aaaaain_.”

Sylvain almost comes right there and then. 

He completely lets go of his erection, stuck in limbo between astonishment and incredulity and wonder. 

Hugo, the man that has haunted his nights for months on end, has just moaned his name as he fucked himself.

Once again, Hugo seems to not quite believe what has come out of his own mouth, because his chest flushes red from exhaustion and a little embarrassment, but he starts again, reaching deeper and deeper onto the toy as he jerks himself off, precum dripping along the length and onto the silicone. Sylvain is hypnotized as he brings his hand back to his dick, the man’s voice, rough from exhaustion, like honey to his ears, and he imagines his hands encompassing Hugo’s thin hips to drive him farther and faster and harder onto his cock. 

“H-how do you feel? Is it- am I- is it goo-_oooood_?”

Sylvain’s fingers are frantic on his keyboard as he types, a series of_god yes_, _youre amazing_, _so beautiful_, _ just perfect_, and Hugo exhales a breathless laugh as he moans again. His hair tie comes loose and whole locks of hair fall like dark water along his face and across his shoulders, but Hugo seems to not even care, eyes shut close as he’s fucking himself in earnest and moaning words sounding very close to _ god _ and _ fuck _ and _ Sylvain_. Hugo is very rarely this vocal, and the sound makes Sylvain squeeze the base of his cock to hold back from coming right away, tight like Hugo’s hole around the toy.

Hugo seems to force his voice to be steady, but it’s a struggle, because Sylvain can still hear it wavering a little bit when he addresses the viewers, when he addresses _ him_, _ you want to come, don’t you?_, and Sylvains thinks and types and moans _ yes, yes, yes_.

“Do it then,” Hugo says as the hand not busy with his cock reaches behind him, “fuck-- please, come, come inside me, I want it, I want you, Syl_vain_\--”

Sylvain comes harder than he’s ever came, streaks of semen coating his hand as he strokes hard and swears and groans, and when the stars fade from his eyes he sees Hugo arch back as he keens, real cum mixing with the fake one pulsing from the toy deep inside of him and onto the floor.

The rest of the livestream is hazy to him; he vaguely remembers Hugo cleaning himself and the floor, complaining all the damn time, getting out a series of reluctant thanks and answering a few random questions some other viewers have for him. Sylvain doesn’t type anything else, doesn’t dare saying anything else, from the confines of his own delusional mind - that Hugo had gotten off to _ him_, to whatever image he had conjured of Sylvain inside his head, even though he doesn’t even address whatever just transpired. The other viewers log off, one after the other, the number of people dropping out to the teens, then to the single digits. 

Sylvain still stays. 

7, 5, 3 - 2.

Hugo looks into the camera again, right through him. 

“And once again you’re still gonna stay until the very end, even after all that, huh.”

Sylvain has no time to answer before the stream goes offline.

===

The capital is tall and ancient, a city-sized museum, and Sylvain likes it very much.

He has lived not that far from there, all things considering, for his whole life, but there’s a different atmosphere to the exact place that he cannot quite identify. It feels very much like home, except more busy and polluted and liberating. He had spent the majority of his first day after the move wandering the paved streets and high arches of his neighborhood, climbing up the stone stairs leading straight to monuments he had only seen in history books, talking and introducing himself to the shop owners around his new flat. Some people recognize him, of course they do, but it’s a far lower number of them than where he usually lives or travels, and that makes it a blessing in and of itself. 

He feels like this is a place where he doesn’t have to be a Gautier before being Sylvain.

Ingrid and Dorothea had helped him move whatever the moving van could not hold, Claude driving and playing lighthearted pop songs while the girls sang along. He hadn’t brought Hilda with him, for pretty obvious reasons, but the girl still called them on video as she was doing her nails to offer a simulacrum of support. 

Now, only one thing remains for him to do before he lives the first day of the rest of his new life.

He steps into the tall, glass building in front of him, prettily clashing with the rest of the historical neighborhood around it, with its reflective windows and steel beams. It’s a big magazine, he knows, one that deals with economy and finance and all the stuff rich people like him are supposed to care about. He doesn’t care. It’s never been the world he belonged in, no matter how much his father tried to force it.

He cares even less about the receptionist at the desk, who obviously recognizes him long before he actually tells her his name, long eyelashes batting like Hugo’s flickering fairy lights. He looks around in disinterest, watching the journalists and attachés and interns buzzing around the hive they earn their living in, thinking that he can spot long, dark hair for a single glimpse, an ephemeral vision like a ghost sighting in a haunted house. He shakes himself awake, or at least, awaker than he already is. She directs him to the 12th floor, to a waiting room near an open-space newsroom, where every single gaze turns to him when he walks through to pour himself a coffee at the stand against a wall and sit down on a plush chair. It’s not unusual for him, to be so scrutinized, but even years later he cannot stand it. His mind drifts back to Hugo again - he doesn’t know how the man does it, reveling in the observance of a hundred or so strangers, every single stare focused on him while he cannot even stare back properly. 

He sips on his coffee as he watches the clock strike three minutes past the designated meeting time, and the flurry of a high-pitched voice steps towards him, framed by a small figure and big round eyes and purple hair.

“Mr. Gautier! So sorry for being late, I’m Bernadetta von Varley--”

Sylvain chuckles the apology off, shaking the woman’s hand. “It’s nothing to worry about, and please, call me Sylvain.”

There’s a shift in the air behind her, like the stiffness of a winter breeze, and when Sylvain raises his gaze--

Five steps. The whole world,_ his _ whole world, reduces to just the five steps between him and the man holding a camera with long, scarred white fingers.

It’s him, Sylvain remembers thinking.

It’s him, with his long dark hair undone and falling across his shoulders, with his pale white skin coloring in the electric lights, with his amber eyes burning to melting as they bore into his.

As always, Sylvain does not say anything, does not_ dare _ say anything.

He does not even dare breathe.

But he knows that Hugo-- that the man in front of him knows, that he knows that Sylvain knows, because there’s an awareness to his gaze almost akin to recognition. Most of all, he knows that Hugo acknowledges him not as another rich kid, not as a Gautier, but as _ Sylvain_.

The man steps forward, right hand outstretched, the one that did so many filthy things to himself as he cried Sylvain’s name the last time Sylvain watched him, and for a single moment that ghost of a smirk quirks up his features.

“Name’s Felix,” he says as he shakes Sylvain’s hand, so, so warm. “Felix Fraldarius.”


	2. my heart broke when i saw you kept your gaze controlled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Felix has never been the best at reading people, in part because he’s always so quick to see the bad even in the best of them; but where the rest of their usual interlocutors were pompous pricks, Sylvain Gautier seems nothing more, nothing less than a pressured rich kid who never asked for any of this.  
Then again, if he truly is _The_ Sylvain, the guy willfully wrote his username down as _Maneater420_, and Felix doesn’t know if the guy has the worst sense of humor or if he’s just that moronic."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen i listened to nicki minaj's get on your knees on repeat as i was writing this and it shows
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH to everyone for the response to this fic!!! I truly did not expect the Power of the Horny lmao  
Also WE HAVE ART NOW!!!! Big thanks to [Dianxiaa](https://twitter.com/_dianxiaa/status/1184520752214634496) and Sun for the amazing fanarts!! <3 You guys warmed my cold dead heart for months
> 
> here's chapter two, with felix's point of view <3 i hope you like it as much as you did the first!!

There are three thoughts that cross Felix's mind as he shakes Sylvain Gautier's hand.

One: Sylvain is not that common a first name, even in their country. Sure, he might have known one boy or two in middle school with that name; one was a dumb soccer player who called him a faggot in public and sent him pictures of his tiny dick behind the closed doors of his bedroom, and the other was a skater boy with long greasy hair and band shirts twice his size who only knew to play Wonderwall and Seven Nation Army on his black electric guitar. None of them were tall redheads with brown eyes. (None of them were his type, his traitorous mind helpfully supplies, and he fights the blush threatening to crawl up his neck as he does the memories of a few nights prior.)

Two: If it truly is  _ The _ Sylvain, as he's now started referring to him inside his head, the way he has described himself is both very true and quite inexact -- because the man in front of him isn't  _ just _ a tall redhead with brown eyes: his hair is artfully mussed-up, with careful precision that must have taken years to pin down, half-curls fanning away from his face in refined messiness. His eyes are the brown of autumn and warm tea and the overripe apples Felix keeps in his fruit bowl to pretend he eats healthily when Annette shows up out of the blue; they're framed by long, full eyelashes that he's infuriated are naturally curled up. He's a good half-head taller, too, and when he smiles to Felix, it's not as perfect as it was with Bernadetta -- it's a little crooked, a little toothy, and God are these fucking  _ dimples- _ \-- he stares at Felix as though he recognizes him, and Felix tries his hardest not to reflect on the fact that he looks  _ exactly _ like the underwear model who was the unaware recipient of Felix's teenage, hormonal, thrice-a-day masturbation ritual from fourteen to eighteen years old.

Three: Felix's name means "lucky", and in this very moment, he doesn't know if it is incredibly accurate or unfortunately incorrect.

“Nice to meet you,” Sylvain says like he’s cognizant of the world’s best-kept secret, eyes glinting behind rose-gold round glasses, and the phantom relief of his warm fingers brushing away has Felix feeling tethered right to his orbit.

Bernadetta launches into her usual address,  _ thank you so much for having agreed to that interview _ and all the customary bullshit and heavy-handed compliments she gives to the people they meet so that they’ll keep talking to rich assholes about rich assholey things in another rich-asshole-readership issue of the weekly supplement to her daily newspaper. It’s jarring how Sylvain --  _ Gautier _ , is his surname, and Felix distantly remembers having heard that somewhere before -- both does and does not look the part; there’s concealed conceit in his countenance, in the way he holds his chin a little higher than what could be considered conventional, in the commanding curve of his gaze contemplating the rest of the newsroom behind them, as though he is accustomed to people stopping and staring, as though they're expected to make way else he push them aside himself with a mere gaze and the bump of a shoulder. Yet there’s an ease to his smile, an amenable eloquence to his tone, an affable amplitude to his attitude, the evidence of his intention to set himself apart from his peers. 

Felix has never been the best at reading people, in part because he’s always so quick to see the bad even in the best of them; but where the rest of their usual interlocutors were pompous pricks, Sylvain Gautier seems nothing more, nothing less than a pressured rich kid who never asked for any of this.

Then again, if he truly is  _ The _ Sylvain, the guy willfully wrote his username down as  _ Maneater420, _ and Felix doesn’t know if the guy has the worst sense of humor or if he’s just that moronic.

They’re walking across the carpeted hallways through the website department of the newsroom, Sylvain chatting amicably with Bernadetta -- and Felix notices, how their coworkers and other random guests stare, turn their heads and do double-takes so fast they may as well strain the muscles in their necks, look him up and down in appreciation and wantonness and a hint of envy. If Sylvain is in any way annoyed or offended, he has the practiced expertise not to show it.

Bernadetta leads them to the lift at the end of the hallway, probably to borrow one of the unused rooms on floor 3, the ones most of the journalists and interns use as glorified storage rooms. Felix has not uttered a single word since his first introduction, but he can still feel the subdued curiosity in Sylvain’s gaze as the man keeps him in view, not quite looking straight even as they stand close, while the whirring of the machinery fills the space between them like the crackling of white noise. Felix has learned to tune out Bernadetta’s usual rambling, the anxiety she feels at interviewing someone of Sylvain’s potential status not doing any favors to the impostor syndrome Felix knows she carries along each of her steps, but when Sylvain chuckles good-naturedly at one of her jokes, the sound carries louder than any other noise surrounding them.

The elevator ride has to be the longest Felix has ever experienced, although it lasts mere seconds; Sylvain stands close, but not close enough to touch, and the distance is somehow torturous -- Felix doesn’t know if he wishes it widened or gone altogether. The subtle scent of Sylvain’s fragrance settles in the small space, saturates the stretch between them with spice and smoke and dependence, and Felix finds himself fancying Bernadetta to be anywhere but here, just so he could push the alarm button and discover exactly if Sylvain tasted like any of these things as well. 

He doesn’t feel it often, that instant chemistry like the teeter-totter of a tempestuous tropical tide, like worlds slowly colliding in relucent explosions and coalescing to burnished. It’s very intense and only mildly terrifying, because Felix understands lust better than he does that other L-word he almost never thinks about, not since he was thirteen and he locked himself out of the feeling as Dimitri locked himself into self-hatred and guilt and mania.

“After you,” Sylvain says with an exaggerated flourish when the elevator doors open and Bernadetta walks out, and Felix is tempted to either punch him or push him against the wall and let the doors close behind them. He merely rolls his eyes instead, represses the bit of laughter that threatens its way out of his mouth as he follows.

Sylvain sips his coffee as Bernadetta is setting out what she needs for the interview in the only clear, tidy room they find -- puts the microphone on the table and her notebook in her lap; the smell drifts in warm, invisible tremors in the atmosphere as the liquid undulates down Sylvain’s throat along the sway of his Adam’s apple. Felix can almost taste the bitterness of it, as he daydreams himself mouthing against the long line of Sylvain’s neck. Sylvain looks right into his eyes when he licks a stray drop along the rim of the cup, the tip of his tongue red as his hair, with all the candor of a rose-cheeked teenager who knows exactly what they’re doing, and Felix wants to feel that tongue catch against the tapered trims of his spine as it trails down, down, down.

“So,” Bernadetta says as she sits opposite Sylvain, the scraping of the chair filling the relative emptiness of the room, “surely you’ve been interviewed before, Mr. Gautier?”

Sylvain smiles, and it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Unfortunately, yes. Blame my late father. Off the record, of course.” He adds an aggravating wink to his second thought.

“I’m sorry for your loss, truly.”

“Thank you,” Sylvain answers, and the tone in his voice seems to say  _ trust me, I’m not. _

“I’m just going to go through the usual reminders,” Bernadetta keeps on, earnest and mindful. “I’ll ask some questions, some of them I’ve already gone through and validated with your agent -- Miss Galatea, was it? I think it was.” She looks to Felix as though he knows the answer, somehow still unsure despite her years of experience, and Felix merely shrugs both in reassurance and indifference. “Anyway. When I ask questions, please try and repeat them in your answers, so that it’ll be easier to rewrite, and it’ll seem more natural that way. I still don’t know if the article is going to be a  _ portrait _ or a simple interview, I still need Hub-- Mr. Vestra to confirm this with me--”

“It’s okay,” Sylvain says, encouraging through his obvious amusement. “I’m sure you’ll do great. I’ve read some of your articles, you have a great sense of style.”

Felix isn’t sure if Sylvain’s lying, but the compliment doesn’t seem to have its intended effect, and Felix softly snorts as Bernadetta stiffens in her chair beside him. Felix has worked with her for years, and Bernadetta never was one to respond well to praise and acclaim; she’s probably one of the few people Felix knows to have an even more negative outlook on people and situations. He doesn’t really know where it hails from, that pessimism and that belying behavior; has never really cared to know, if he’s perfectly honest. Felix doesn’t get close to most people, keeps them at bay, believes the eye of the hurricane keeps him safe from pain as it keeps him away from life -- and Bernadetta's nice enough, but she's no Dorothea, doesn't know the extent of Felix's prurience, doesn't get what kind of job a freelance photographer like him does on the side to keep from starving at the end of the month. He’s not sure he’d ever want her to know.

It escapes him, therefore, why he’s so attentive to Sylvain; maybe it’s because he shares the name of the dumb soccer player who sent him dick pics, or maybe it’s because he looks just like Felix’s ultimate teenage fantasy, or maybe it’s because Felix was lucky (unlucky) enough to somehow catch the attention of one of the men featured in last year’s Fortune 500 list. 

Maybe it’s because he had not come that hard onstream in years, and he can still feel Sylvain’s name unconsciously rolling off his tongue as he did.

“Let’s start the interview,” Bernadetta simply answers as she presses the record button on the microphone.

Felix keeps fiddling with his phone, barely solicitous of the possible interferences that will probably plague Bernadetta’s recording later, if only to keep himself distracted from the obvious distraction that’s Sylvain’s voice, Sylvain’s eyes, Sylvain’s entire being -- how his tongue catches on the complex economics vocabulary Felix doesn’t care to understand as though he’s not used to the words, how the shirt under his suit jacket stretches to almost-sunder as he crosses his fingers behind his head, how his gaze keeps drifting heedlessly to Felix’s fingers as Felix drums them on the table to the unconscious rhythm of the rain outside. He’s pretty sure Bernadetta is going to chew him out for this later, the pitter-patter of fingertips on wood probably covering up some words on the tape, but the restless energy Felix has felt since he walked in on Sylvain Gautier needs an outlet somehow, though he wishes it would assume a different shape.

“Why did you resign from your position as CEO of LCG?”  _ Oh. _ The banks. That’s where Felix has heard the name before. “Wasn’t it in your father’s will, for you to inherit the executive chair after he died?”

Sylvain hums as he looks aside, calculated and exercised, but it still seems somehow sincere, and Felix raises his gaze to him. “Do you want to know what my father said, when I told him what major I wanted to pursue in college?” He smiles as he pauses, and Bernadetta takes a few seconds to realize it isn’t a rhetorical question.

“You have an economics major, don’t you?”

“I do, yeah. But it wasn’t my own choice.” He makes a show of raising a hand to hide his mouth from nobody’s view, and Felix hates how he finds the gesture both irritating and charming. “I… wanted to major in Art History.”

That makes Bernadetta stifle a cry of surprise and Felix frown and cock his head. 

“My father,” Sylvain continues, glancing out the window with his chin in his hand, “expressly wrote a letter to the University Chairman to ban me from any art-related course or class. Gave a blank check along that, offering financial support to the institution if they did as he said. You can keep that on-record,” he adds as he spots the astonishment pulling up at Bernadetta’s expression, and the smirk on his face is proud and glorious.

Felix is almost impressed.

“I accepted it, of course,” he keeps on, unphased, “because I was a dumb rich kid who didn’t know any better. But once I grew up, once I saw people struggling for the bare minimum required for survival… I couldn’t stand it. I hated all of it. And now, I don’t want to have any part in that corrupt system at all.”

Felix hears Bernadetta’s frown in her tone more than he sees it. “But you’re still a shareholder of LCG, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I am, because I’m contractually obligated to for a year -- but I already reduced my share so much that I virtually don’t have any importance or decisionary impact on the company anymore.” Another of these amused, mysterious smiles that Felix would love nothing more than to feel against every inch of his skin. “I’m like a ghost, really. It’s fun.”

Felix knows it’s easy for him to say, knows he won’t be struggling much with the probably colossal inheritance he got from his father’s death, but he also knows better than to mention it; after all, he, too, had been relatively well-off before he told his father to go fuck himself.

“What are you going to do now? Any plans for the future?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot,” Sylvain says as he looks back outside, to the drying drops drizzling on the glass, “about what I should do. I’ve spent my whole life trying to please people who I didn’t care to please, trying to be whatever they needed, without thinking about who  _ I _ needed to be for myself. I… think I’m going to start with that.”

“Who  _ are _ you, then, Sylvain Gautier?” The sharpness of Bernadetta’s gaze almost rivals Sylvain’s own, before he shrugs.

“I’m 25 going on 26, and I’m a prominent public figure, and…” He inhales softly, his chest barely rising and expanding around a coffee-stained sigh. “And I’m a gay man, and I think some people might need that. Might need me speaking up about it.”

Felix doesn’t see Bernadetta’s expression as he bursts into laughter.

Felix has always hated the sound of his own laughter; it was always loud, and unrefined, and a little crass --  _ not befit someone like you, _ his father used to say, repressing the joy as every Fraldarius before him did every other emotion. He hears it ringing against the bare walls of the small room, echoing like blasphemy in a cathedral, a chortle as unelegant as the word itself, uninhibited and uproarious. He cannot see Bernadetta’s face through his half-shut eyes, through the lock of dark hair falling in front of his face as he fails to stifle the sound that keeps forcing its way out of his very heart and lungs -- he does not even know why exactly he’s laughing, although he feels the toll of dither and wonder and respite like a bell through his ribs and into his nerves. He opens his eyes through the fit, and looks up, and Sylvain is looking straight at him; there’s a flush to his face and a glint to his gaze and a lull to the breath he holds between half-opened lips, before he hurriedly glances to the side and exhales the ghost of an ethereal giggle. 

“He’s right, though,” Felix manages to say to Bernadetta once his laughter subsides. “A lot of gay people would need someone like that. I know I did.”

“I’m not that special anyway. I’m just a tall redhead with brown eyes.”

Felix doesn’t know how on God’s green earth he manages not to choke as he stares at Sylvain, and he’s saved from another bout of hysterical laughter by Bernadetta’s godsent intervention.

“Off the record -- aren’t you afraid of the backlash if I publish that? You… know how it’s been lately.”

“What can I say,” Sylvain says, airy and unconcerned, but he fixates burnt sienna irises on Felix. “Maybe I’ve met someone who makes me want to make bad decisions.”

The last remnants of Felix’s laughter die on his tongue like the last dregs of a morning coffee. He averts his eyes as his hands go back to fiddling idly with his camera buttons and switches and settings.

If Bernadetta notices, she makes no remark about it, and professionally carries on the interview. “You used to be a model, maybe you want to go back to that?”

Felix freezes as Sylvain laughs. It’s too outlandish, too improbable, but Felix’s mind races as his heart picks up pace inside his chest, not quite frantic, but almost double-time. He thinks back of his fifteen-year-old self, leaner and shorter-haired and less scarred, overwrought in the secreted light of his bedroom, when hushed-up moans spilled out of his mouth and all over the sheets as he stared at red hair and auburn eyes on wrinkled, glossy paper. 

“I used to, yes! I’m not that interested anymore, though, it was kind of a side-job.” Sylvain eyes Felix as the sentence trickles out of his mouth, sly and deliberate.

“What did you use to model for?” It’s the first thing Felix has said to Sylvain himself since he shook his hand, and it slips out of him unbidden, in a way that makes Felix almost regret it.

“Aren’t you curious?” Sylvain teases with a wink, and Felix fights the urge to bodily throw him against a wall. 

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m a photographer.” Felix points a bored finger to the camera around his neck. “It’s kind of my job.” He hopes the deflection is enough to hide the filthy, filthy thoughts that have just made their way into his brain. 

“Oh, how could I not notice?” The smirk on Sylvain’s face is infuriating and hot and infuriatingly hot, perfect white teeth just shy of biting into the pulp of his lip, voice singing through the gaps as he drawls the  _ s _ like syrup transuding on pastries. “I’ve modeled from 16 to 20 years old,” he answers more seriously, “for different high-end brands. Runways, sometimes, but for ads, usually. Clothing, mostly… underwear, too.”

Felix phases out the rest of the interview from his mind as he tries his hardest to appear unbothered. 

===

The way Sylvain fills the viewfinder of Felix’s camera is downright mesmerizing.

He is merely sitting in a plush chair in the middle of an unused reception room, white walls dripping anaesthetic, the lone, uncovered window shining the natural December lustre onto his hair in a smoldering crimson; and yet, he is the only ornament the room needs, a still sculpture Felix breathes life in one shutter sound at a time, synchronic to Felix’s own heartbeat. His legs are crossed, one knee on the other, the wrinkles in the fabric of his suit pants perfectly calculated and measured, long fingers loosely entwined over his thighs.

“You can relax, you know,” Felix tells him, and the smile Sylvain shoots in answer turns the lines at the corners of his eyes into sunrays, brown eyes drowned-in crepuscular by the morning light. As he stands up, graceful and assured, and undoes the buttons of his jacket enticingly slowly, Felix recalls how he always was the kind of person who’d try and brush curious fingers against the untouchable works of art in the museums Annette forced him to visit from time to time when they were college students -- how he’d verify by himself the structure and solidity of sculptures, as though pressing his hands into marble thighs or stone pillows would turn them as soft and pliant as the real things. He lets his gaze roam over Sylvain’s shape instead, substitute to his fingertips and nails, subtly hidden behind the 50mm lens.

The shirt clings tight to broad shoulders and strong arms, and Felix keeps himself from thinking how Sylvain is the exact model, the exact  _ person _ he’d been fantasizing fucking him during his last livestream, keeps himself from envisioning these long, heavy fingers pressing blemishes into the revolvers carved into his skin, keeps himself from picturing exactly what lies underneath the tight-fitted, burgundy suit pants that hug his thighs and stretch taunt in-between them. 

It would be so simple, now that Bernadetta’s gone to report to Vestra, to just push Sylvain against the lone table near the far-off wall and unravel him until he’s short of a few braincells and spent of a lot more sweat and spit and seed.

“You’ve modeled before, right?” Felix says instead, a distraction to his traitorous train of thought. Sylvain looks at him between two poses, candid and inquisitive, the hand that was previously mussing up his hair dropping gracefully to his side. He could feel it, in the few pictures he’s taken, that meticulous calculation in each of his movements, in the tilt of his head, in the curl of his half-smile -- Sylvain Gautier knows how to look enticing, knows how to highlight his already evident winsomeness, knows how to make the whole performance appear instinctive and involuntary and irresistible. “Why did you stop?”

Felix would not have noticed the way Sylvain’s eyes widened if he wasn’t so used to watch and study every simple motion in every person in front of his camera, but he’s familiar with the drop of his gaze and the wither of his smile, intimately comprehends the bitterness that flickers along his expression, because Felix himself has worn the exact look for so long. The wane of a wry sigh makes the air shiver between them.

“You can’t always get what you want, I guess,” Sylvain simply says, and oh if Felix doesn’t relate to that. He doesn’t pry, and presses the shutter on his camera again as Sylvain switches back into a relaxed pose as though nothing had been said.

Sylvain’s hair is falling in his eyes now that he’s removed his glasses for the pictures, lone evidence of the troubles fluming inside him, the red tips of it entwining into redder eyelashes and transmuting the smokey topaz beneath into vanadinite. It kindles annoyance like a flare inside Felix’s gut, and like all things annoying, Felix wants it gone. The camera drops from his hand and around his neck like an anchor, like a sinker, and he frowns as he crosses the room to him, three, two, one step. Sylvain’s gaze is startled and searching, his stance just shy of slipping, and before he lets go of the pose Felix closes the space between them and reaches up.

He can see the light shining off the scars around his fingers as he brushes Sylvain’s hair away from his eyes, the back of his knuckles grazing Sylvain’s forehead and temple along the small intake of breath that makes Sylvain’s chest rise between them and almost touch Felix’s own. Felix desperately tries not to focus on anything but the lock of hair he pushes back, not on Sylvain’s eyes like molten copper dripping and burning basalt against his skin, not on Sylvain’s red, red lips parting in the slightest of slivers, not on Sylvain’s faded freckles sifted over his nose and cheekbones like cassonade. His fingers have a mind of their own as they graze down the side of Sylvain’s jaw, tilt his chin up and about with two knuckles so that the beautiful, beautiful slants of his face catch the edge of sunshine.

They stay in place even after the job is done, Felix losing himself in the warmth and greed flaring up in Sylvain’s gaze -- oh, how simple it would be, he thinks again, to just push Sylvain against that wall and undo him at the seams--

“So it’ll be a portrait after all,” Bernadetta says as she enters the room again, and Felix jumps apart from Sylvain as though he’s been stung, his feet taking a sharp turn around back to the other side of the room.

“Can I smoke here?” Sylvain asks, and doesn’t even wait for Bernadetta’s answer before he opens the window and pulls a packet out of his abandoned suit jacket. Felix busies himself with scrolling through the pictures he’s already taken as the smell of smoke and ash and death drifts into the room along the chilly winter wind, as though watching Sylvain’s face and body on a small LCD screen will let him calm down from almost jumping the real thing. Bernadetta levels him with a meddlesome gaze, but doesn’t say anything; there’s plenty enough judgement in the gray of her eyes already. 

Felix has no choice but to escape her by turning around and to Sylvain again, and at least the man isn’t staring at him, too, although the vision before him is excruciating in a whole other way.

His elbows are propped against the edge of the opened window as he’s facing the view outside, seemingly deep in thought, even though Felix knows there’s nothing to admire but beaten-up cars and the asphalt of a sedative parking lot. He’s all carmine and cardinal and captivating, red in a sea of white and grey, the smoke he exhales evanishing his hair to apricot; the tip of the cigarette ignites the color of his eyes, the open window behind him framing his silhouette like an oil painting, and Felix reframes it himself in turn as he raises the camera and looks into the viewfinder. As Sylvain exhales again, the shutter goes off, ribbons of smoke immortalized motionless in graceful, beautifying arabesques.

Felix goes home that day with the languishing, longing sensation of Sylvain’s breath on his neck as he looked over Felix’s shoulder to check the shots Felix had taken of him, the exhales disturbing Felix’s hair and making the locks brush against his collarbone, and Felix’s anguished yearning to feel Sylvain’s lips breathing lust and luxury and other L-words into the soft skin there.

Felix goes home that day with Sylvain Gautier’s professional card and a hastily-scrawled personal number at the back of it, left in his camera bag after the interview and burning a hole into the bottom lining.

_ Annette _ , he texts his sunny, sprightly, rational best friend in the subway back to his flat,  _ I think I’m fucked. _

_ In what way? _ is her simple answer, always to-the-point.

Felix refrains from answering  _ Not in the way I’d like. _

===

At exactly 9:27pm, Sylvain -- because there’s absolutely no way Felix is going to call him by his stupid username -- logs in on the website. 

Felix is supposed to start his stream in three minutes. The fairy lights are on above his mattress, the blankets straightened out and fresh-smelling from the wash, his cat probably sleeping soundly somewhere in the living room. He’s made himself all cosy, as usual -- he’s only in the black jeans he wore earlier, having removed his shirt as soon as he’d crossed the doorway at noon, all the while fighting against the fervent urge to thrust his cock into his fist until nothing could come out of it anymore. He’s tried to distract himself all afternoon by touching up and airbrushing the pictures he had taken, although that did little in terms of distraction and only contributed even more to the restlessness that has settled into his very bones since this morning -- not to mention it proved fairly hard to touch up and airbrush one of the closer definitions to  _ perfect _ he had ever met. The bun he’s pulled his hair in is untwining free, locks falling along the pale neck he sees reflected in the flip screen of his DSLR, the same he uses for his day job. He cannot really bring himself to care.

9:28pm. He has to make sure.

He lets his mouse hover over the  _ Private Room _ button on his profile, the one he only uses as a last resort, when the rent is due and he didn’t manage to get enough money from both his jobs the month before. He always somehow suggests it, although he’d never admit it -- his pride would not let him; no, he performs theatrics, pretends to be forced and compelled to ask, as though it’s a favor he grants a lucky few and not a supplication he’s lowering himself to, waits until someone clicks the button in his place and makes a show of aggravation and detestation before he settles to do what’s basically a mere routine formality. Private shows are the exact same as public livecams, after all, just for less numerous eyes.

It’s the first time he actually brings himself to click the button first anyway. 

It’s not even for money, or for the prospect of a long-winded, five-hour session; Felix just wants to satisfy his own curiosity for a few minutes, before he closes the window and gets on with the rest of his usual show.

He clicks on his profile’s highest donator, the crass username unsightly and garish; there’s not even a picture on the top-left. An empty profile for a probably empty existence, he thinks, and he’s reminded of Sylvain’s words earlier --  _ I’m like a ghost, really, _ that smile that’s half a smirk searing white over the shivers along Felix’s spine,  _ it’s fun, _ and Felix cannot fathom how it could be fun for someone, to be coerced into concealing themselves this way if they wanted to live for their own sake in spite of the wishes and plans of others. 

The clock shifts to 9:29 when Felix clicks on the  _ Invite to Private Show _ in royal blue Arial 8 on Sylvain’s profile.

He deciphers the tension in his own shoulders on the small screen that pops up, mirroring his camera at the top-right, the way his toes squirm underneath his thighs as he sits cross-legged on his mattress, his laptop in front of him -- until the person answers and the screen flickers to burnt sienna eyes lazily looking at him.

Felix sighs in frustration. “God, why does it have to be you.”

Sylvain Gautier laughs, the sound clear as a bell through the hand that fails to smother it properly. The camera clearly seems to be a simple, built-in webcam, but the picture is clear enough for the details in Sylvain’s face to shine through the bleary reading lamp light, the edges of his jaw softened by the slight noise covering the image in almost imperceptible pixels. He looks… more delicate, somehow, the tips of his hair feathered and flossy, his skin silk and gossamer. There’s a glint of incisors and canines, blurred along their lines, that would seem predatory in any other fashion; here, it just makes Sylvain’s eyes crinkle at the edges. 

“I  _ did _ try to drop hints, earlier, you know.”

Felix tries his best to keep his tone to his usual dryness, like he’s not just out of breath at the mere notion of it all. “Yeah, who in the  _ world _ would have guessed that the young and hot rich son of an old and ugly rich guy would use the username  _ Maneater420 _ on a fucking gay cam site.”

The flush rising along Sylvain’s neck tints his carnation a pretty coral, saturating in places where the camera fails to keep up with his movements. “Hey, I have an explanation to that, okay? It was a friend who made the account for me,” he says after a defeated sigh, and Felix sees his reflection break into a grin in the small rectangle above Sylvain’s camera.

“Right, that’s what everyone says--”

“So you think I’m hot,” he says, and that smile of his plays over his face again like a song, sensuous and soundlessly sonorous.

Felix won’t give him the satisfaction to agree, no matter how much he wants to. “You obviously don’t need me to confirm that, do you?”

The camera catches a little as Sylvain shrugs, clearly insouciant. “But it’s always nice, don’t you think? To have someone tell you you’re  _ beautiful. _ ”

It’s so damn calculated, and Felix hates that it still brings up flashbacks, snapshots of himself sighing and shivering and splintering at the seams as he read the word in the small chat box, wondering how it would sound as it swirled down someone’s tongue -- hates that the way Sylvain utters it now curls down into his gut and heats up the blood in his veins. 

Felix has never thought of himself as beautiful; he may be a little alluring, yes, a little fit, but people usually don’t come to him for another pretty face or sweet talk. People on the internet come to him because he’s unkind and snappy and it hits their submission kinks in all the right places over all the right buttons. People in real life come to him for the very same reason, until they cannot handle it any more and leave him even more alone than he previously was. Felix is okay with it, learned to be okay with it; it’s one of the reasons why he began to do cam sex work, the easy praise, the feeling of being stunning and sublime until the viewers get what they came for and the afterglow fades.

“I wouldn’t know,” Felix answers, and he sees Sylvain’s eyebrows furrow and drawing blurry lines above his nose, but the words he’s about to say die in his throat as Felix hears his bedroom door bang against the wall and the sound of little claws on the floorboards. “Wait-- Ashe, God, don’t come in here--”

Ashe jumps on the bed in all his fluffy, Turkish Angora-crossbreed glory, and types some abstract apocryphal words on the keyboard he steps on, probably to spite Felix for having left him alone as he’s wont to do on livestream nights. 

“Wait,” Sylvain says in-between fits of graceful laughter, echoing in Felix’s bedroom as though he’s mere centimeters away now that Ashe has inadvertently pressed the volume-up key, “I didn’t know you had a cat!”

“Yeah, I never mention him on-stream,” Felix says as he picks up his pet in his arms, and Ashe’s claws are half-burying into his collarbone. “He’s-- what, five years old now? My best friend found him in the street and wanted to adopt him, but his boyfriend’s allergic, so I was stuck with the stuff.” He affectionately scratches Ashe between the ears, the cat’s grey-blue eyes looking at him with the same amount of judgement as Annette earlier when she’d come by for coffee and Felix had told her all about… well, the very man he was talking to right now.

Sylvain seems very interested in the cat, all of a sudden, and Felix is almost miffed. “Why Ashe? Because he has the color of ashes?”

“Nah, because it’s my best friend’s name.”

Sylvain laughs again, bright and true and burning. “So you named him after your best friend.”

“My  _ other _ best friend named him after my best friend.”

“Ooh, Felix Fraldarius sure is popular.” Sylvain’s teeth almost pull on the edge of his bottom lip as he teases him, and the shape of the syllables as his name rustles out of his mouth, contralto and susurrated, spills along his spine and to the small of his back like syrup.

Felix slowly rises from his mattress and unceremoniously drops Ashe out of his bedroom before closing the door behind him.

“Are you gonna be okay?” He says as he comes back in the camera frame, settling back on his mattress the exact way he was, letting his cheek rest against his fist as his elbow digs into the meat of his thigh.

Sylvain raises an eyebrow. “About what?”

“The whole coming-out thing.” Felix distraitly twirls a lock of hair around his finger. “I thought… It was courageous of you. I don’t know if I’d do the same, if I was in your position.”

“There’s no one left close to me to give me grief about it,” Sylvain says, casual and nonchalant, as though it does not matter in the slightest that he has no one  _ close to him _ at all. “The people who had to know have known for a while, and a lot walked out, but the best remained. It’s all that matters to me.”

“So you don’t care about your reputation?”

Sylvain’s laugh is sharp at that, the edges digging into Felix’s lungs. “I already didn’t have the best reputation to begin with. Another scandal or two won’t hurt me much.”

Felix frowns. “You’re assuming I’ve heard about you before.”

That seems to surprise Sylvain, from the way his eyes widen against his will, the brown turning bourbon in the reading light. “You don’t read many magazines, do you?”

“I don’t really care for tabloids. I… may have seen a picture or two, but that’s about it.” Felix answers that as though he hasn’t spent years and years as a teenager dreaming up scenarios involving a younger, modelling Sylvain, as though he doesn’t remember exactly having pictured his very face when Sylvain had said to him he was just a tall redhead with brown eyes, as though there isn’t one of Sylvain’s pictures still fullscreen on his desk computer, waiting to be touched and brushed and smoothed over in the way Felix wishes he could replicate directly on Sylvain’s skin. “I think I saw some of your modelling pictures, actually.” It’s a harmless half-truth, the kind Felix specializes in settling for.

“These were taken a long time ago. I’m almost six years older, now.”

“Yeah,” Felix says before he can keep his mind in check, “I noticed.”

Sylvain’s smile fades into a simple curl of his mouth. “Is that so? What did you think?”

His voice has gone close to an octave down, and the crackle of the bad computer microphone crawls like tremors along Felix’s arms. “Let’s just say I don’t need to photoshop your face too much.”

“Good thing you got that hair out of my face, right?”

Felix’s breath catches in his throat like salty seawind, cool and rough. “Not like you stayed in place for long after that.”

A smooth, silken smile. “Were you going to kiss me?”

_ Yes, _ Felix wants to say, reckless and fierce,  _ I was going to kiss you and push my fingers in-between all of your cracks and pull you apart until the only thing you’d say was my name. _

“Maybe,” is what he answers instead.

Sylvain’s eyes gleam cinnabar in shamelessness. “You could have, you know. I’d let you do anything to me.”

The fist that holds Felix’s chin drops idly, slowly, along Felix’s thigh as the sentence snakes down his chest. “Someone was going to come back, eventually.”  _ Unlike right now, _ Felix leaves unvoiced. 

He only now notices that Sylvain’s shirt is opened, the first few buttons carefully undone over the dip of his collarbones and the birth lines of his chest, a flowing V pointing down the path Felix wants to tread with his fingers and his tongue. “I would have pushed that table against the door.”

“That’s a shame,” Felix answers, fingers tracing the edge of his inner thigh. “That’s right where I wanted you.”

The sharp intake of breath that fills Sylvain’s lungs crackles along the microphone waves. One of Sylvain’s hands has left his desk to seek refuge somewhere underneath, and Felix wants to see what Sylvain is doing to himself in the secrecy of it, wants to observe the exact way his nails catch on the fabric of his pants as he slides the zipper down, wants to analyze the manner with which he makes himself come apart for Felix’s eyes only. “That would have made quite a lot of noise.”

“Depends what I’d done to you.”

Sylvain sighs, a small sough that scatters out like shattered glass, and Felix can feel his own cock straining against the cloth of his pants. A fingertip snags there, half-accidentally, and he feels the coldness of a shiver slide down his backbone like an ice cube, delicious in contrast to the feverish haze he’s been thrown in. “What did you want to do?” Sylvain asks like a challenge, defiant and thrilling, and Felix has never been one to back down from a challenge, so he answers. 

“I’d have removed that awfully tight shirt of yours,” he starts, and revels at the sight of Sylvain deftly unbuttoning his shirt in turn, until Felix can stare at the strong, narrow lines of his chest and abs, defined even in the low light. There’s a trail of red hair tracing a line down from his belly button, a pathway to a thousand promises, and Felix’s careless tongue licks his lips. Felix can see the hint of fabric abruptly cut by the harsh line of the desk. That won’t do, he thinks, and says so in the best way he can. “I’d have pushed you against the wall until I could see you -- all of you, to check if you were just as I imagined.”

Sylvain laughs as he kicks his chair back a few centimeters, until Felix can decipher the sharp press of Sylvain’s length against the burgundy of his suit slacks, until he pictures himself mouthing along the thick bulge there from underneath Sylvain’s desk, half-hidden from view. He presses the heel of his palm against his own erection as Sylvain speaks again. “So you’ve really thought about me.”

_ Every night for the last week, _ Felix’s mind supplies in betrayal. “Don’t flatter yourself,” is what slips from between his lips, but it’s clear from Sylvain’s gaze on him, honey-red with heat and hunger, that he knows exactly what he’s doing to Felix. 

“Oh, I’d never dare to, sweetheart.”

Felix’s mind short-circuits, both at the way his hand presses against him in just the right way and at the pet name whispered across through the radio waves, and his sigh turns into half a moan.

He doesn’t comprehend why it makes him feel this way -- Felix  _ hates _ pet names, hates when perverted strangers on the internet think they can get away with calling him terms of endearment they don’t even mean; but perhaps Sylvain is not exactly a perverted stranger on the internet, not anymore, not after the memory of soft red hair and softer red eyes lingers in Felix’s mind and takes root inside his lungs, not after he closes his eyes and dreams himself undoing Sylvain’s pants against a table in a bare white room as he undoes his own in the loneliness of his own bedroom.

“I’d have--” he continues, his hand finally unwinding the final button of his jeans, diving under his underwear to wrap around himself, “I’d have put my hands on your thighs, let my fingers trace the shape of your cock between them--” He hears the whisper of fabric sliding across skin, and opens his eyes to the sight of Sylvain--

Sylvain circling long fingers over the tip of his hard, uncut cock, dragging down six barbells pierced across the underside.

Felix’s throat goes dry as he strokes himself rock hard.

Sylvain isn’t wrecked enough to stop teasing, it seems. “Like what you see?”

_ God, yes, _ Felix thinks. “You’re full of surprises,  _ Sylvain, _ ” he says instead, and sees the whisper of the name shiver in goosebumps along Sylvain’s bare chest. Sylvain’s thumb traces the outside of the head before he lets his nail graze against the slit, and Felix sees the wetness of precum gathering there before Sylvain drags it down over the piercings, pulling at them slightly as his palm makes its way to the base. Felix wants to feel all of it against his tongue and the roof of his mouth, wants to gently pull at each of the silver balls with his teeth, wants to heat up the cold metal to his own body temperature inside each of his holes. Sylvain says _ something, _ his lips curling around the words like they would around Felix’s length, and the crackle of the microphone is so unbearable that he abruptly rises from his bed, his dick hard and leaking back into his underwear as he crosses the room to get his phone and a small card at the bottom of his camera bag.

Sylvain looks almost vexed when Felix comes back to his bed and types the number at the back of the card, but his expression instantly lights up when he hears his phone vibrating on the side of his desk.

His smile is smug and intoxicating as he clicks the screen of his smartphone. “Is that better?”

“Much better,” Felix answers, unashamed, as he pulls his erection back out and spreads the drops at the tip all over the skin, top to base. His other hand holds the phone close, each of Sylvain’s sighs and breaths quivering along his ear and neck as though he was here, as though Sylvain was humming open-mouthed kisses and purring shapeless words along the expanse of his throat, as though Sylvain was fisting his length himself with long, warm fingers. “I want,” Felix starts again, and it’s breathless and needy, in the way he only is when he’s incredibly turned on, “I want to take you in my mouth, I want to suck you off--”

“Fuck,  _ Felix, _ ” Sylvain moans, and the song of his name almost pushes him over the edge, so sudden that he opens his eyes and watches as Sylvain touches himself, teeth teasing at the plush flesh of his lower lip, “you’d look so good-- you’d feel so  _ good _ with your mouth around my cock, so wet and tight--”

Felix keens as his nails catch on his sensitive tip, as Sylvain’s words of praise trickle along his ribs and seep into the deepest parts of himself, as Sylvain’s fingers let go of his phone and put him on speaker before opening a drawer near his desk and pulling out a bottle of lube, half empty. 

“What are you gonna do with that?” Felix teases, his voice pitching baritone from its former tenor, canines baring as he smirks in anticipation.

Sylvain’s laugh is winded when he lets go of his cock, swaying hard and heavy against his stomach, his hand uncapping the bottle and liberally pouring the contents over his fingers. “Why don’t I show you?” he says instead, and Felix moans low and rough as he watches Sylvain bury a finger deep inside himself, down to the second knuckle. The rim of his hole drags around the skin as he slowly pulls back, lube dripping in damp drops on the leather of his chair, before he pushes back in, his mouth falling open wordlessly as his eyes fall shut.

It’s not the lewdest thing Felix has ever watched, but it’s most certainly the hottest -- Sylvain’s hair sticks crimson against his temples, long lashes wet with sweat and unshed tears, freckles contrasting against his skin in the late evening light, red as lust and red as love. He slides a second finger next to the first one, his voice fanning feathery over the phone, _ I fingered myself earlier, you know, you just looked so perfect, so fuckable, _ and Felix’s hand traces shivers over his cock again as he whimpers. “Yes, yes,” Felix hears himself saying, like his soul has departed his body and rings disembodied through the hazy aphrodisia, “fuck yourself for me,” and he apparently only has to ask, because Sylvain slides a vibrator out of the drawer, too -- Felix barely has the time to recognize it as one of the same ones he owns, small and sleek, when Sylvain slicks it up with lube. Sylvain’s hole clenches around thin air when he removes his fingers, and Felix has to let go of himself not to spill all over himself already, before Sylvain sinks the toy deep inside his ass. 

There’s poetic justice here, in Felix watching over as Sylvain fucks himself with his vibrator, his moans breathy and low-pitched and saccharine, black treacle mizzling into his mind through the phone distortions; the contrapasso has Felix feel like he’s just about to be reaped for Rapture. He sees and hears and almost feels the pulsations wracking Sylvain’s whole frame as he moans, loud and open, as his hand goes back to teasing the barbells under his cock before fully fisting the length, and Felix feels himself throbbing in time like a frantic heartbeat, hips thrusting into his hand as Sylvain sighs his name in coloraturas,  _ Felix, Felix, Felix _ \-- 

“Yes, fuck,” Felix moans, picking up pace, he’s close, so, so close, “you’re so good, Sylvain--”

“Felix, I’m--”

_ Yes, _ Felix trills like a hymn, _ do it, come for me, come all over yourself,  _ and he barely sees Sylvain spilling over his fingers before he throws his head back and feels the warmth of his seed threading lace along his stomach as he empties himself. 

He closes his laptop with the heel of his foot, too spent and tired to move any other body part, and lets the phone fall on the mattress close to his ear.

“That was… That was…”

_ Yeah, yeah, _ Felix can only say, and the last thing he remembers is closing his eyes to the sound of Sylvain’s breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter got so fucking out of hand none of them wanted to do what i wanted them to do
> 
> in the next chapter: bonding! dates! angst! also top felix because i have an Agenda


	3. why can't i keep you safe as my own

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "He wonders if he’s the only viewer, getting the privilege of real discussions and light-hearted chats with Felix —_ Felix,_ he thinks again, not Hugo, not the image on a computer screen but an actual, corporeal person, a person whose hand he shook and felt against his hair and face, whose warmth he noticed through the receding distance between them, whose scent he indulged in as he stood looking over his shoulder and the soft, pale expanse of his throat.  
He smothers the feeling that rises inside his chest, that tastes like yearning, that tastes like hope."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just cannot believe the response on this fic. im just completely blown away. Also RATTY/ARESNA did some [AMAZING ART FOR THE LAST CHAPTER](https://twitter.com/rattywizard/status/1189151359678869504?s=20) GOD it's my homescreen now   
I also realized that Blood Orange (and especially their album Cupid Deluxe) is the perfect OST to camboy au so please listen to them on Spotify as you read that chapter
> 
> this chapter is 15k words, which is almost double the ones before -- at first, i wanted to cut it, but the only place i could have would have fucked with the layout i planned for this fic AND would have left us with an Angsty Cliffhanger, and i decided that sylvix fandom has suffered too much, thank you very much.
> 
> Anyway, he's a Light-Hearted Reading Not At All Full of Sylvain Trauma!!! also sex. thanks so much to Demmy for having beta'd it!!!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!!

The moment Sylvain winds up with Felix’s phone number, complications breeze in like powder snow on winter nights.

It’s Felix, oddly, who texts him first; Sylvain had suppressed the urge, after that evening where the sound of Felix’s dozing breathing had filled the emptiness of his yet-to-be-furnished bedroom, Sylvain’s murmurs of his name too loud yet too quiet to wake him up. He’d hung up then, with whispers of good night and sweet dreams that Felix had not heard and would probably not appreciate hearing. He’d repressed the impulse to talk to him again, willed his fingertips off the letter keys and onto the backspace, deleting the discomforting hellos and erasing the exasperating how-are-yous — until the vicious circle of non-expression binds him one morning, an endless rinse and repeat and rinse again, and his phone vibrates in his hand as an oblong bubble pops up. _i can see you typing you know,_ Felix texts, and for a single second Sylvain speculates the sight of Felix stuck in the very same cycle, words waxing and waning on a digital keyboard.

He’s made it a habit, by now, of locking up and away these fantasies of his; even as he answers, he doesn’t break this one.

It spirals, still, a slow show like a distant dance, innocent until it isn’t — their conversations turn constant, fluctuate between earthy everyday and fiery fervency, a rise and fall and rise like Sylvain’s chest after the first time they call each other again. _I want you here,_ Felix had whispered eventually, voice the gossamer of striking thunder after an hour-long, innocuous build-up, _on my bed, inside, inside me,_ and Sylvain’s heart had fractured against his bones as he answered, _you’ve got me, I’m here, I’m not going anywhere,_ until they both had pretended not having said anything at all when they said goodbye.

Sylvain doesn’t get the pleasure of an accidental private cam show again, not when he gets much better, nightly phone calls they both initiate, early morning texts that shift to late morning sexts; Sylvain wonders if it truly is as hot and good for Felix as it is for him, wonders if, like Sylvain has sometimes done with overly eager and awkward hookups, he’s multitasking writing lewd sentences and doing the dishes or folding laundry — at least until he receives a picture, one day, of Felix’s hair feathered along the pillowcase as he looks up into the lens, cum and sweat like dew over his stomach, the flushed tip of his cock still leaking there and onto the tattoos in the line of his hips.

He wonders if he’s the only viewer, getting the privilege of real discussions and light-hearted chats with Felix —_ Felix,_ he thinks again, not Hugo, not the image on a computer screen but an actual, corporeal person, a person whose hand he shook and felt against his hair and face, whose warmth he noticed through the receding distance between them, whose scent he indulged in as he stood looking over his shoulder and the soft, pale expanse of his throat.

He smothers the feeling that rises inside his chest, that tastes like yearning, that tastes like hope.

===

“Are you gonna be alright?”

Claude’s voice is clear and bright over the worry in his tone and the bustling airport in the background, his pitch tenor and the color of a crackling television. Sylvain finishes re-shelving a book he’s spent most of his morning and early afternoon skimming, fingers tracing the different tableaux and portraits reproduced onto lustre paper, his phone tucked between his shoulder and his ear. “Of course I’m gonna be alright! It’s not like you have a lot of customers anyway-”

“Hey!”

“Am I wrong though?” Sylvain tilts his tone trite and teasing. “Who knows, maybe my handsome face will bring more people than your grubby one — you know you should definitely lose the beard, right?”

“I’ll have you know that this beard was half the reason I got laid last night.”

Sylvain whistles, mock-impressed. “Who’s the lucky guy? Or girl. Or person.”

“Blond, blue eyes, ripped as all hell, with a fuckton of daddy issues and in desperate need of therapy.”

“Ooh, just your type, then.”

Claude doesn’t take the bait. There’s a sigh like the utterance of an untold deliberation, like an onomatopoeia of resignation. “I’m sorry I have to leave you alone this Christmas. You know how my dad is.”

Sylvain does know how Claude’s dad is — always bothering him to travel south for the end-of-year celebrations, even when Claude tells him he already has plans, nagging and accepting and loving. Claude does go back home once every two years, has done so since they were seventeen; the other year was usually spent with his mother’s family, until Sylvain had turned twenty-one and Claude’s odd Christmases were wasted wasted-er on expensive red wine along Sylvain, at either Dorothea’s or Ingrid’s place, the only parade Sylvain had found against the mock-celebration his father usually organized with him and a dozen of his horrible, wealthy, horribly wealthy false-friends. Now his father was dead, and his horribly wealthy friends had forsaken Sylvain when the interview came out, and Sylvain would spend Christmas alone.

It’s not the loneliness of it that bothers him; he only wishes it could, once again, come to exist by choice, and not by obligation.

So Sylvain, creature of habit that he is, does what he’s always done in regards to feelings deeper than what people expect of him.

“Did you have to pay an overweight baggage fare? Since you’ve got — what, probably 30 pounds of gifts for your cousins in there?”

“Very funny, Gautier,” Claude answers in a voice that confirms he actually does find the joke a little funny, but doesn’t want Sylvain to be aware of that. Sylvain is just relieved he’s letting the whole conversation slide. “Anyway, Dorothea texted that she wanted to see me before I left, but since I’m already at the airport, give her a kiss for me when she inevitably comes to leech some more free coffee off of my shop, yeah?”

“You say that like we don’t _all_ do it.”

“Truly I have the worst friends,” Claude dismisses as an announcement echoes in distorted French along his sentence. “Fuck, I have to go.”

Sylvain smiles, honest in the secrecy of the empty shop. “Merry Christmas, Claude.”

“Yeah. ...Take care, Sylvain.”

Sylvain’s gaze refocuses on the covered spine of the book he was reading earlier as Claude hangs up, now nestled back in its rightful place on the Art and Design shelf in the small bookshop. Claude’s store is a tiny, cosy place, comfortable and familiar like a second home; the white bricks faded to chiffon that make up the arch-like ceiling are almost hidden away by towering bookcases, filled to the brim with paperbacks and hardcovers alike. Tall, wooden ladders slide against the furniture, to be used when even Sylvain isn’t big enough to reach the top of the skyscraping shelves. The place percolates the stuffy scent of time, essences of old pages and fresh coffee and primeval stone, narrow like a path to knowledge and peace. Sylvain likes working here; likes helping out Claude take care of the place while he’s away on holidays, although it’s merely temporary. Perhaps a part of him wishes it wasn’t; perhaps there’s a voice, ancient and solemn, telling him he could live this way, after years and years in soulless offices and poisoned atmospheres and hollow amenity.

His mind drifts back to the interview, to how bold he’d felt when he had come out in the silence of that tiny reception room, to how small he’d truly been when hit by the onslaught of calls and emails from former partners and colleagues alike, vows of hatred and empty, greedy support. He had thought Ingrid would tear into him for that — and it had been almost worse, the quiet compassion in her spring eyes, the slight downturn of her lips, the bloom in her_ I’m proud of you._

It’s funny, how once it was all he had ever dreamt of; a life free of responsibilities and the hindrance of his name, a path of infinite possibilities stretched out before him, an existence of wind and whims and weightlessness, devoid of trials and full of tribulations. At seventeen, the prospect was resplendent; at twenty-five, it was terrifying. He’d let himself cry in Ingrid’s arms, just a little, just a minute — a silent avowal of vulnerability, a temporary lapse of gaiety — before he’d closed his eyes along with his heart, and let himself forget about his visionless future by drinking in all of Felix’s sights and sighs.

He’s pulled out of his contemplations by the distinct melody of a wind chime swinging against the doorframe, and he lazily stretches his arms to the high ceiling before he feels a soft frame barrel into his side, arms snaking around his waist in a now-familiar hug.

“You didn’t say Claude was leaving,” Dorothea says, her eyes full of accusation and fake aggravation. “How am I to _ever_ spend Christmas without my two favorite disasters?”

“Just left me the keys, actually,” Sylvain says as his hand smooths the slightly unruly locks at the top of her head. “Plus, you have Ingrid, you won’t exactly be alone-”

The last syllable dies on his tongue as his gaze rises along the pair of feet, and long, toned legs, and fit, slim shape behind her.

Felix’s hair filters from a high ponytail like black coffee, the tips swiping along the side of his throat and into the woolen scarf around his neck, amber eyes rusted russet in what seems like surprise, cold-bitten lips opened on a held breath — winter is a good look on him, Sylvain thinks just as he mirrors Felix’s expression, makes his skin paler and his gaze darker and his cheeks redder.

Sylvain has always loved winter.

“Oh, Sylvain, meet Felix! He’s a friend of mine, we met on a photoshoot some time ago-”

“We’ve already met, actually,” Felix answers with as much dismissal he seems to be able to muster, and Sylvain is relieved to see the hint of a flustered flush across his nose, though it might only be because it’s so cold outside.

“Oh, right,” Dorothea says, eyes sharp and knowing, “you did mention you took that picture for his interview. How could I forget,” she adds, as though she had ever forgotten anything in her life, as though she would especially forget a precious piece of information like this.

It’s not like Sylvain had mentioned Felix to any of her friends — it was too secret, and too special, and too soon; therefore, it could only mean that _Felix_ had been the one to mention him to Dorothea, and the sensation seeping into the seams of him simulates the rising of a subtle sun. His gaze drifts to Felix again, standing cautious as a cat near the shop doorway, and when their eyes meet he seems to be suddenly finding the high ceiling and the towers of paper incredibly interesting.

“Nice to see you again,” Sylvain says, and none of them thankfully notice his breath comes out short on the last word. “Thea, Claude said to give you a kiss and all of the shop’s coffee supply.”

“Please give me the second and not the first,” Dorothea says as she brushes her lips against his cheek anyway, and he follows her with a roll of eyes as she moves toward the small kitchen door behind the counter. Perhaps it’s also like a second home to her, who’s lived in the city almost her whole life and has known the previous owner even before Claude had become his clerk — even though they’d all met in college, different majors taking the same class, the only class close to Art History Sylvain could enroll into and escape his father’s influence. Dorothea skirts the cash register counter with practiced steps and sways of hips, and Sylvain looks back to the still shell-shocked shape of Felix Fraldarius, the afternoon light contrasting in contre-jour from the book-curtained arched window above the doorway.

“Coffee?” Sylvain says as smoothly as he can, camouflaging the way his brain simply stops processing words whenever the man in front of him is in his close vicinity — it’d been a wonder he had even been able to go through with that interview.

“Coffee.” Felix simply replies as he steps further into the shop, closer to him.

Sylvain can feel his smile twist a little devious, the dimples he always tries his best to hide showing up against his will. “After you,” he says as Felix passes him on the way to the open kitchen door, with none of the hyperbolic flourishes he’d punctuated the gesture with last time, in the elevator — and he’s so close he can feel the warmth of his winter clothes, and Felix’s gaze on him burns, burns, burns—

“Sylvain? Where’s the coffee pot again?”

“Third shelf to the right,” he calls as Felix pushes on towards her, and he can do nothing but follow.

Dorothea is spooning ground coffee into the moka pot when Sylvain closes the wooden door behind them, her coat folded in half over the back of one of the three lone chairs set in the middle of the room, their seats tucked far under the small square table in an effort to leave more space for actual grown human bodies to move around. The shelves are full of cookbooks and mugs and tea boxes, and Dorothea grabs three cups hanging from the hooks above the small sink after she turns on the stove to let the coffee pot brew its magic. Sylvain takes the seat closest to the door, just in case a customer comes in or a lost tourist accidentally winds up asking for directions to the more successful English bookshop in the neighborhood, while Felix decides to sit in the chair on his right — the other chair is right behind Thea, and it’d probably be improper as well as cumbersome to slide behind her and steal the seat there. He removes a dark teal coat from his shoulders, the scarf around his neck unwinding in a puddle of yarn on the table, and there’s a black turtleneck shirt sinfully clinging tight to his chest and arms.

“How’s Ingrid?” Sylvain asks Dorothea, half a distraction as Felix’s fingers flick nonchalant against the screen of his phone.

“She’s fine now that she doesn’t have to do any more damage control for you,” she says, her voice a little less bitter than Sylvain would have expected.

The tone still makes him bite his lip. “Sorry. I know she hasn’t had a proper night’s sleep in a week.”

“Because of the interview?” Felix asks, his eyes warmer in the yellow light of the fixture overhead, looking straight at him. There’s vapor curling out of the pot like a heated exhale.

Sylvain shrugs. “She knew in advance, obviously. I think none of us were prepared for how many people would care, though.” It’s true — he did not think, still does not think, his mere existence to warrant this kind of backlash or elation, not when the only worth to be found there comes exclusively from his place in the economic food chain, not when people know his face before even knowing his name and know his name before even caring about knowing anything else.

Felix had done it all in reverse, he realizes, had learnt about everything else before hardly remembering his name and barely reminiscing his face; perhaps it is that awakening that makes him relax his posture, trimming the translucent threads that encourage others to toy with him. Perhaps it is that awakening that makes him slide his foot in-between Felix’s, tangling like loose strings.

To his credit, Felix does not even startle at the gesture, does not even refuse the tactility. There’s the slight raise of an eyebrow and a nonplussed stare, sole evidence he’s even felt the movement against his ankles, before he goes back to scrolling on his phone. The moka pot whistles softly, more noise than sound, and Dorothea pulls it off the stove before the lull of poured liquid steams spicy and sylvan across the room like incense. She slides a chipped cup to him and another, newer one, to Felix, before she drops two lumps of sugar in her own, and Sylvain laughs openly at the distinct distaste on Felix’s face.

“You don’t like sweet things, got it,” Sylvain says as though filing the information for later, before he takes a searing sip.

Dorothea’s chair scrapes against the floorboards as she pulls it to sit. “It feels like I haven’t seen you in _years,_ Sylvie. Are you settling in fine?”

“Given that I’ve spent my whole week assembling furniture, I’m doing good.” He is definitely not about to say he almost lost three fingers in a desperate fight against an Ikea cupboard, especially in front of Felix.

“Oh, Felix, did you know? He lives in your neighborhood! Isn’t that funny?”

Dorothea’s gaze loses nothing of its provocative fern green even as Felix sends her one of the harshest looks Sylvain has ever seen on him, on or off-camera. “I wouldn’t say it’s_ funny,_ Dorothea,” he answers after a sip of coffee, and Dorothea still laughs like it’s the most hilarious thing she’s heard in a week.

“He lives near the market street,” Dorothea keeps on, but Sylvain’s brain does not process the rest of her sentence over the single thought crossing his mind — that he and Felix apparently live rather close to each other. He reaches for his phone in the pocket of his jeans, and the sound of his fingernails tapping the screen drowns Dorothea’s tirade, before it’s replaced by the sound of Felix’s phone buzzing in his hand.

Felix mutters a quick apology before sliding his phone on a more silent mode; judging by the stormy look in his eyes, he’s just shy of throwing Sylvain that harsh glare from earlier. _Neighbors, huh?_ Sylvain can decipher his text in thin lines across Felix’s phone, and Sylvain knows there are the remnants of a post-sext discussion in the little bubbles above it. His hands move under the table as he answers, and Sylvain’s screen flashes. _So what? Don’t even think about coming over._

“How did you two meet?” Felix asks Dorothea, cool and collected, as though he’s just on the edge of boredom.

“Intro to Adaptation class, almost eight years ago, I think?”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Sylvain answers the both of them, and he sees Felix’s phone light up again underneath the table. _Why would I need to come over when you’re right here?_ Sylvain intersperses the words with the tender nudge of his foot against Felix’s calf, a gentle up-and-down that makes Felix’s breath catch ever so slightly in his throat, feathery enough to be innocent, enticing enough to be lascivious.

“He just sat beside me and immediately tried to hit on me. Too bad I fell for the girl who came to hit him over the head instead.”

“You truly have no shame,” Felix says, and Sylvain doesn’t know to which sentences, to which actions — probably both, if he’s lucky —, his gaze igniting turmeric and sparking like a match and gasoline in Sylvain’s veins.

Sylvain sharpens his smile like a knife. “What would _you_ know about that, I wonder?” He lets his voice purr the syllables and sees the shiver sliding up Felix’s skin in goosebumps along the skim of his foot, up and down and up, deliberate in its leisure.

“Believe it or not, Dorothea talks about you, sometimes.” The smirk on Felix’s face is the most delightful thing he has ever seen, and Sylvain wants to taste the sting of it against his tongue, wants Felix’s teeth honed along the edges of his collarbones. Felix acuminates his nails on Sylvain’s thigh, now, reaching high as he digs gentle scars into the fabric, trailing gray on their way up, up, up—

“And here I thought you only said nice things about me, Thea,” Sylvain tries as he looks at his friend, who just rolls her eyes as she sips her coffee.

“You’re better, now, at least.”

“See, Felix?” And oh, will Sylvain never tire of the way his name tumbles along his tongue and against his lips, melodious as a sonnet, soft as a promise. “I’m_ better_ now.”

“Is that so?” Felix says, barely above a whisper.

Sylvain doesn’t know if he jumps at the blast of Dorothea’s ringtone ricocheting across the room, or at the feeling of Felix’s fingers against the strain of his cock beneath his jeans.

“It’s Ingrid.” Dorothea rises from her seat. Sylvain cannot even pay attention to anything else but the craving charring crimson in Felix’s eyes and the soft sound of the kitchen door shutting behind their friend.

Felix’s hand closes tight around his cock, his thumb running along the half-hard length, and Sylvain almost knocks coffee everywhere over the table as he pulls Felix’s wrist and brings him over to him.

It’s surreal, the way Felix lets himself be pulled into Sylvain’s space and onto his lap, as though he, too, had been esurient for warmth and scent and touch; his legs slot around Sylvain’s thighs and his fingers entwine in Sylvain’s hair as Sylvain’s hands press along the firm muscles of his legs up to his ass, Sylvain’s fingertips curling into the soft flesh there and chiseling their shape as their erections grind against each other._ God, yes, finally_ tumbles out of Felix’s mouth and in the crook of Sylvain’s neck, and Sylvain traces the scent of coffee along Felix’s throat to his ear, nipping at the soft skin there; the moan he’s bestowed with makes him feel like a fucking teenager, and he thrusts harder and slower against Felix, wishing he could leave fingerprints all over his body like a crime scene for people to amalyze tonight, in the dim spark of flickering fairy lights.

“Sylvain,” Felix breathes as he rests his forehead against Sylvain’s, one hand desperately trying to reach for the edge of his own pants, _yes, love, I’m here,_ Sylvain cannot help but answer, and Felix smells like coffee and books and winter as he rises and falls like ocean tides against Sylvain’s straining cock — “Please,” and Sylvain’s fingers reach up to tangle into that café noir ponytail as he opens his mouth to sip in the sound—

“Yeah, have a nice day, too,” Dorothea’s voice, full of affection, rings through the decrepit door, and Felix and Sylvain fly apart a single second before she opens the door again.

===

That night, for the first time in more than a year, Sylvain misses Felix’s cam show — too busy apologizing to Dorothea over the dinner he entirely pays for her and Ingrid, losing himself in glasses of wine and plates of entrées and descriptions of Felix.

He comes back home demi-dazed and quasi-content, wandering the half-empty streets, lit up with the xanthous flare of the street lights and the shimmering snow of the christmas decorations curling around the trees. The air is dry, crisp inside his lungs, the scent of cold fire smoky as it drifts past in a subtle breeze when a few cars pass him by. The pavement shines dark sapphire as it turns to ivory cobblestone along the stairs leading to the downward part of his neighborhood, old Haussmannian buildings lining the sides; most windows are curtain-closed, gentle shadows swaying along the pleats and folds, though Sylvain spots the occasional shutter-less oriel, public alcove for a dozen secrets, like a fretful cigarette drag or an evasive tumult of laughter or a full view of disentangling figures.

He’s skipping down the steps when his phone vibrates inside the pocket of his coat, and the name flashing on the screen makes his heart follow along.

“You weren’t here tonight,” Felix says, no prelude or prologue or author’s note. His tone is clipped through the husk, hazy and nebulous like the streets Sylvain walks.

Sylvain hums a graceful, contralto C, the note lost in the volutes sipping out of his throat into the cold, late night. “Sorry, I was taking out Dorothea. For our little… stunt, earlier,” he appends, just in case Felix was the type of person to mistake friendly outings between two people of different genders for more than it was. It wouldn’t be the first time; Dorothea was a very pretty woman, and Sylvain knew he was pretty fucking hot. People easily drew hasty conclusions about the state of their relationship — they’d actually encouraged it, more than once, to get free false-anniversary drinks, sometimes, to drive incommodious men away from her, often. Tonight probably would have gone the same way, if it hadn’t been for Ingrid and the way Dorothea kept looking at his childhood best friend as though she was her whole universe and then some.

There’s a huff blowing crackling noises across the radio waves. “She didn’t even see anything.”

“Oh, but she _definitely_ knew. Tore into me by texts after you guys left.” It had been urgent and worrisome, Dorothea’s _I’m so sorry Sylvie, I have to go,_ and Felix had frowned and laid a hand on her shoulder as they’d walked out the small kitchen, and Sylvain had in turn called Ingrid until she’d lain his concerns to rest; it’d been a simple Christmas matter, as it so often is these days in his group of friends, it seems, something about Ingrid not being able to go with Dorothea at her former Christmas class reunion. That had been the other intent behind tonight’s dinner; asking Ingrid to spend the evening with him, alone on their couch, just like old times.

There’s a small pause, pregnant with the sound of Sylvain’s steps down the sinuous streets and the vestiges of conversation and alcohol and cigarette smoke along the tables outside the bars. Felix’s stretch drags a yawn out of him. “Well, too bad. You missed out.”

“Missed out on what?” Sylvain says through an amused laugh. “What ever did you do?”

Felix’s songful hum is half-drowned by the whirl of life Friday nights typically offer. “Someone bought me kegel balls, so I tried them out. ...Also wore the red teddy, too, from that time.”

Sylvain inhales sharply, sharp enough for the cold to burn a clean wound in his chest. He had almost completely forgotten about the other gifts from_ that time,_ how he had spent subsequent nights sublimating a sketch of Felix in his mind’s eye — charcoal edges blended and blurred in the shadows of hours witching him away onto Sylvain’s body and into Sylvain’s sheets, bedizened by purled crimson lace or tulle tinselled with stones or Sylvain’s own shirts. “You haven’t tried on the black one yet.”

“It’s not even a teddy, to be honest — it’s just a fucking strip. A literal strip. That cost probably way too much for how little fabric there is.”

_Good,_ Sylvain thinks, selfishly, _keep it that way, I want to be the only one who ever gets to see it._ “That’s a shame,” he says instead, and if he keeps the sinful phantasm entrapped in the cat’s cradle of his heart, perhaps he can indulge, just a little. “I wish you’d wear it for me, sometime around.”

The quiescence of the alleys and passages echoes in Felix’s unspeaking breathing, and Sylvain wonders if he somehow crossed a line; he chooses to deflect with a careful turn of conversation as he rounds a street corner. “... Have you cleaned yourself up yet?”

“Possibly,” Felix half-sighs into the receiver, “possibly not. Why?”

“_God,_ I wanna see you.”

It’s too truthful, the fire-flavored liquor leavings on his lips making him bolder than he’d ought to be — too manifest of the feeling coursing in his veins, the one he usually immures in the papery confines of his ribcage, bleeding through like Indian ink; another taut string resembling desire, entangled with _something else,_ and he almost cuts it off and laughs it away when Felix answers instead.

“Where are you right now?”

“Um— In the middle of a street—”

“No. _Where._ Which street.”

That takes Sylvain aback, almost makes him stop in his tracks, before it dawns on him. Oh, _right,_ they’re_ neighbors,_ Thea had said so, and suddenly he’s half-rushing to the end of the street, flat heels ringing like war drums on the cobblestone market plaza. “Um. Rue Duhesme?” He answers, reading the sign on the stone-and-marble wall above a closed shop, his eyes squinting in the half-light and semi-tipsiness. “I’m like, fifty steps away from my flat.”

There’s a light, breathless laugh breezing from the other side, and for a single moment Sylvain can almost feel it against his cheek, sweet and sultry, coffee-spiced in the strait atmosphere of a narrow kitchen. “God, Dorothea wasn’t lying when she said you didn’t live that far.”

Sylvain’s feet are walking his usual path home, steps echoing in the emptying alleys as the hush of midnight quietens the usual liveliness of his neighborhood and emphasizes the restless beating of his heart. He sees the door to his building, tall and wooden and closer and closer, and he would still turn around right now and run over to Felix if he told him where he lived.

Felix is quiet, too, as the streets and the sounds and the shadows sliding along windows, and Sylvain wonders if he contemplates it, the sight of Sylvain in the frame of his doorway and the dark, seconds before he steps in and close and shatters into him. “... Maybe another time,” he speaks, final but not definite, and there’s a hint of respite in the disappointment Sylvain releases. “Let’s say it’s your punishment for not having showed up onstream earlier.”

Sylvain’s fingers fly against lit-up numbers as he types in his door code, a buzzing sound letting him in and concealing the sigh he lets out. “It’s okay.” The metallic rustle of his keys as he swipes his badge on the second door is too loud in the empty hall, shakes in time with his pulse. “I’m already plenty satisfied with a phone call.”

Felix huffs in something resembling annoyance or vexation over the strident beep of the elevator, soothing over the sound like palms tidying sheets. “I guess you don’t wanna see me _that_ badly, then.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Sylvain exhales in a half-laugh as the elevator doors close behind him. “It’s… very nice too, having you all to myself like this.”

The intake of breath Felix swallows is cusped, splintery and serrated like a gilded stiletto; it stabs right through Sylvain’s throat, drags the sting down, opens up his chest for everyone to pick apart and tear into, until it snakes down to his stomach and burns, burns, burns a dozen lacerations there until Sylvain’s half-hard against the fabric of his pants.

“Sylvain,” Felix sighs as Sylvain’s keys slide into and tumble the lock open, voice just like it’s sung against his neck this afternoon, breathy with want, breathy with _need._ “Please touch me again.”

Sylvain’s door closes behind him as he slides down and touches himself the exact way he’d touch everything Felix is, everything Felix would be willing to give him.

“Let’s go for coffee,” Sylvain says after another athirst phone call, minutes waxing down into hours, and he doesn’t know what he expects, but it is certainly not Felix’s bright, bright laughter before he answers _Fuck it, why not?_

===

Ingrid’s hair is tickling the side of his neck as she’s pressed into his side, sniffling a little at the climax of the stupid Christmas movie she insisted they watch — a fourteenth-century knight has time-travelled to their modern-day world and is wooing a cute, sunny brunette until he eventually dies of dysentery, probably, he hasn’t kept track — but Sylvain doesn’t dare making fun of her, not when he knows that he’ll be in the same state in about two hours when they rewatch Love Actually and Mark confesses to Juliet through written signboards. The smell of homemade mulled wine fills Ingrid’s living room and their lungs as they’re curled on the couch, a heavy, fluffy blanket thrown over the both of them.

“Sorry you can’t spend the night with your girlfriend,” Sylvain says as he carelessly hands the almost-empty box of tissues to his best friend, who’s stubbornly trying not to let too many tears run down her cheeks, to keep them in the scrunched-up wrinkles of her face.

“I want to propose to her,” Ingrid answers, the television glow shining faded rainbows in her undine eyes, and Sylvain does not feel as surprised as he probably should.

“You haven’t told your dad yet, have you?”

Ingrid laughs, and it’s bittersweet as their drinks and the cinnamon rolls they’re stuffing their mouths with. She doesn’t say anything else. Sylvain knows better than to push the issue; Ingrid is not out to a lot of people, and her over-protective, slightly-more-conservative-than-the-norm father still thinks Dorothea’s her roommate, two years after they moved in together — he’s either very oblivious or not quite ready, Sylvain thinks, because he’s never seen him mention the fact that their flat only has one bedroom with a king-sized bed.

“I really dodged a bullet, didn’t I,” he says, more to himself than to anyone else. He does not continue the thought, but he doesn’t need to; Ingrid _knows_ him, knows him truer and deeper than anyone ever has, knows the following sentence was _when I waited until my dad died to come out,_ until the only one who could have truly done something about it — like throwing him out or disowning him or non-accidentally push him off a cliff — was out of the picture.

He feels Ingrid’s shrug against his ribs. “Other people would say it’s a smart move. Well. Mostly Claude, but we know how Claude is.”

He runs his fingers through her hair, soft and flaxen and shiny in the gaps between his knuckles. “I’m sure Dorothea understands.”

“I know she does. But… I wish I could bring myself to do more.”

“So you decide to forget about her class reunion with literal strangers and skip directly to the wedding ceremony. Figures.”

Ingrid elbows him with more force than he expects. He often forgets how strong she is, in every way, until she reminds him with punches and declarations like these ones. “I’m counting on you to help with the preparations.”

Sylvain kisses the top of her head. “With you yelling at me about every little detail? Wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Hours later, he takes a simple picture of Ingrid, asleep in the dim light of the DVD menu looping in the background, head resting uncomfortably on the armrest of the couch. Her short hair is mussed up around her face, softening the edges of her cheekbones, bare from the iron mask she usually presents; her frame is curled out of her usual proud stance and grounded figure, the heavy blanket ebbing and flowing in time with the rise and fall of her shoulders, and Sylvain slides the flash off his phone before he taps the center button and the shutter falls shut. He sends Dorothea the picture, almost captions it _look at your future wife,_ but he deletes it altogether. He’s always been good at keeping secrets.

His finger slides on his conversation with Felix, and he wonders what he’s doing — is he having late-night drinks with his family? Is he, too, watching dumb movies with his friend Annette and his cat Ashe and the actual Ashe?

Is he tumbling in the sheets and blankets of his bed with someone after a Christmas date night?

Sylvain raises the phone to his face; the uncolor of the screen throws sharp shadows across his face, turns his hair umber and his skin ivory and his lips rose quartz. He throws the camera a slight tilt of his head and a well-rehearsed smile, a quirk of lips that he lets reach his eyes only for its intended recipient. The picture is good enough; not the best, but it’ll do, will fulfill its intended purpose — a quiet reminder, bold in its silent cowardice.

_Thinking of you,_ Sylvain types as he sends the picture to Felix. _Merry Christmas._

_Go to sleep,_ Felix answers some minutes later, and the speech bubble underneath as Sylvain reads the text restyles itself in a simple _see you tomorrow._

===

Felix’s figure cuts white and grey over the black wall at the end of the hallway, amber eyes discoloring anything else in view, and Sylvain raises his phone to steal a still, soundless trace of the scene before him.

It had been Felix’s idea, this exhibition, because Annette had given him free tickets to the exhibition hall she was working at, and what better time to go than Christmas afternoon, when everyone would be busy with family lunches and present openings? And Sylvain had not found anything to answer but _yes, okay,_ when Felix had explained his rationale over texts, too thunderstruck in translation —_ is it a date? Is it _not_ a date?_ Like Sylvain’s mind had been picking the petals off a dreamt-up daisy all throughout the days leading up to his turning to Felix as he walked out of the subway station, recontextualizing the cold blooming like red roses over Felix’s cheeks into what interpretation his infatuated intellect would find best suited to the text over the filigrane thoughts.

“Let’s go,” Felix had merely said, face soft in its detachment and the white scarf he buried his nose in, and Sylvain had followed, helpless and restless.

He filters the picture on his screen black-and-grey, as though the common, dark thread of the exhibited pictures Felix is gazing at is weaving itself into the sinews of Sylvain’s reflection on aesthetics; turns the contrast up just a little, fades the shades with a subtle slide of his thumb, saves the photograph without posting it anywhere or sending it to anyone, a private indulgence.

“What are you looking at?” Felix asks as he lowers his hand, in front of him in three sudden steps. He’s removed his coat and scarf, holding them over the crook of an elbow; it’s warm, inside the museum, made warmer by the stairs they have to climb to see the whole exhibition spanning over three stories. Sylvain tries not to let his gaze linger over the hint of clavicle peeking through the V-neck of his black shirt.

“You,” he replies, because it’s true.

Felix raises an eyebrow. “So we come here to look at _film noir_-inspired pictures by an acclaimed, dead photographer, and you look at me instead.”

“What can I say.” It slides, easily, out of his mouth, breathed-in through the space between them, and Sylvain wishes the words to bury deep into Felix’s chest like the tip of a javelin. “I’ve always liked looking at works of art.”

Felix snorts so loudly one of the security guards sitting on a nearby chair shushes him. “You’re so full of shit,” Felix whispers as he steps past Sylvain, bumping a shoulder into him on the way, and it makes Sylvain whirl into his course and pulls a laugh out of him, as though Sylvain’s entire being is attuning itself to Felix’s elemental states and physical stasis and fundamental essence.

Felix’s feet stop in front of each photograph, analyzing them wordlessly, never sharing his thoughts. His gaze is focused, in the way only someone knowledgeable about the subject can focus, eyes lidded, eyebrows drawn in an ever-so-subtle frown; Sylvain wonders what kind of observations are crossing his mind, whether he sees beyond the simple black-and-white scenes and the carefully-unplanned compositions to something deeper, more emotional, the way Sylvain himself has always inspected artworks. It has always been a light point of contention between Dorothea and him, even back when they used to go on mock-afternoon dates to art galleries and national museums — where Dorothea sees art in colors and construction, Sylvain feels aesthetics in the emotions and reflections the pieces bring out of his ever-so dispassionate and ratiocinative heart.

“Have you ever taken wedding pictures?” Sylvain asks, as he looks at a still of a moving car, a bride veil flowing out of the open front window when a woman looks up in the bridge of a laugh. There are a lot of people packed into the back, none looking as happy as she does through the smiles and words frozen in time and space, and Sylvain thinks of Ingrid, of how beautiful she would look with flowers that Sylvain would silently plait through her hair, of the whispers and praises Sylvain would be shouting from the backseat as she’d complain about shutting him up.

“I don’t want to,” Felix answers, definite. “I tried, once, and the bride said I was _ruining the mood_ or something. Shut up,” he shushes Sylvain when he starts laughing again, before the sharp edge of a smirk ghosts over his features and he steps closer into Sylvain’s space. “We can’t all be blessed with Resting Handsome Face.”

Sylvain’s heartbeat stutters at the suddenness of the admission, and he almost takes a step back under the force of the flush that has started to break over his face, but Felix swirls away with a satisfied snort to another framed photograph. This one, he glances at, before his face twists into something wistful, an expression Sylvain has seen on himself too often for comfort, and his posture is graceful and subdued as he sidesteps to let Sylvain look.

An open car window frames the small, sunny silhouettes of two young boys, and Sylvain cannot know if their fighting is just pretend as one of them kneels face-first in the grass; the other holds him by the shoulders, pushing him down, or pulling him up just to push him down again, he imagines. The photograph feels forebodingly familiar, reminiscent of the regular incidents his mother used to ignore and his father used to dismiss —_ boys will be boys,_ he resurrects his father’s voice in the back of his head, misconceiving Miklan’s “play-fighting” in front of their neighbors, until the high-school nurse took notice and his parents threw Sylvain’s brother out as the maid was throwing out the day’s dust-filled binbags. There is a part of Sylvain that understands, deep down, what made Miklan act out this way; it’s been made clearer by finding the family records after the death of their father, who turns out to only be_ Sylvain’s_ father, it seems. Sylvain supposes the lack of love and obvious favoritism distinguishing the older and younger Gautiers is evidential to the consequences of their mother’s loveless marriage.

He wonders if Miklan knows about him — wonders if he’s read Bernadetta’s piece, too, wonders how he’s reacting to Sylvain’s capricious whim of throwing everything Miklan has ever desired away for the sake of being just a hint truer to himself, wonders if he’s making his way to the city in an open-windowed car in order to push Sylvain into the ground for good.

There’s a placard on the side of the frame, signaling of a short story written about the picture they’re staring at, and Felix points to a low table in a corner of the gallery room. Sylvain walks to one of the armchairs, smaller than a loveseat but bigger than a chair, and notices simple sheets of paper bound into a pamphlet. The haze of dulled feeling and vague meditation clouds over Sylvain’s mind, so much that he barely feels Felix taking a seat beside him on the plush padding.

It’s natural as coming home, the way Sylvain lets his arm slide around Felix’s waist in order to take the other side of the opened pamphlet, to let Felix read alongside him; and Felix must be in the same sort of daze that he’s found himself in, because he does not struggle, does not even stiffen — just lets himself curl into Sylvain’s side as they read, his hair lost and loose in the crook of Sylvain’s neck, his expression almost serene as Sylvain deciphers it reflected onto the glassy surface of the low table.

It’s innocent, most of all, and it is what strikes Sylvain the strongest. Sylvain cannot remember the last time he did this kind of thing with one of his former hookups, probably, he ponders, because he never did at all — Sylvain’s usual trysts were single-time all-nighters to be forgotten in the morning and into liquored glasses that induced other single-time, all-nighter trysts, a stable loop of unstable non-relationships. It has always been impulse, rarely desire, never passion; a simple means of swallowing the smallest mouthfuls of pretend-love he could get from the sloppy kisses and the sloppier sex, from the girls willing to bare everything for a moment with the Gautier heir and the boys unwilling to see past the bare body before them, until he could channel his own hatred of himself into the people fucking him into the mattresses and couches and back alleys. A series of unfortunate recollections fuzzes through his mind like an old VHS tape, of college evenings spent drinking and drowning himself into effluviums belonging to any person showing even a slither of interest in him; how their empty compliments and hollow words of praise would cling to his skin like the cold sweat running down his back, how the momentary amnesia and the makeshift fulfillment sex provided was always controverted by the void eating at his chest and the battering-ram feeling of inadequacy in his brain, how the afterglow apperception that people would always desire him in fragments and fractions — and not the exhaustive sum of his parts, never the entirety of his execrable existence — pulled him deeper and darker into that maelstrom.

So he had carried on through this never-ending cycle; because that was how he coped, at first; then, because that was merely what people expected of him, his whole reputation built-up through his ever torn-down self-esteem, until people truly blended the truth of who he was with the lies he tainted his soul with.

It’s been a good few months, though, since that last happened; Sylvain hopes to think he’s getting better, because he _wants_ to get better, for himself as well as for his friends — for Dorothea, always worrying about his well-being, and strong, soft Ingrid, supporting him from the cool shadows he protects her with; for Claude and Hilda, smart and sweet and handling better than anyone else his stupid ministrations; perhaps, too, for dark hair tickling his neck and scarred fingers turning a pamphlet page and copper eyes fluttering from word to word.

“Well, that’s dark,” Felix says, unimpressed, as he starts another paragraph.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Sylvain agrees, and it truly is — the story he’s paying half-attention to deals with toxic masculinity in the young, bullied boys, and the eerie man creeping on them through the car window. “I’m not sure I want to keep on reading.”

“Yeah,” Felix sighs, and the exhale grazes Sylvain’s neck in the barest touch. “Me neither.”

Felix does not move; he stays there, warm against Sylvain’s side, eyelashes fanning against his cheeks as he blinks, and Sylvain tilts his head, tries to catch his gaze, before that ember stare sears every emotion known to man into and under his skin.

Sylvain is barely aware of his own eyes flickering to Felix’s lips; he probably would not have noticed, had the action not been mirrored by the man next to him.

“Hey, aren’t you the Gautier son?”

The grating voice piercing his eardrums makes him jump apart from Felix, turns his gaze cutting and his smile fake, fake, fake.

The man looks commonplace, but the camera bag hanging from his shoulder is conspicuous enough for Sylvain to recognize him as a potential journalist; he’s suddenly looking, very interestedly, at Felix, and Sylvain’s mind teeters like a scratched record, bordering on anger. _How dare you look at him this way,_ he thinks.

“What can I do for you?” he says instead, rising from the armchair.

The man looks back at Sylvain in the way Claude looks at people — curious and calculating and utterly uncalled for. “I work for the _M_? The magazine that released your interview? I’m not here for work, don’t worry,” he tries, as though that will somewhat assuage Sylvain’s wish to tear off his lungs from his chest. “I just think it’s funny; I’ve worked with Felix a couple of times. Guess what they say is true — Sylvain Gautier truly _will_ fuck anyone he meets.”

“What the_ hell _are you saying—”

“You’re right,” Sylvain says with the breeziness of detachment and habit, shushing Felix’s outburst. “The rumors _are_ true. Have a good day.”

He stalks off to the exit of the gallery room, hands into his pockets, hearing nothing but the blood roaring through his nerves.

Felix catches his arm once he’s a good way outside, and Sylvain half-spins along the tug on his elbow; Felix’s hair is slightly disheveled, his breathing labored, his gaze murderous.

“So you _were_ going to fucking leave me here,” Felix spits out eventually, and it burns like venom into Sylvain’s bloodflow. “What gives?!”

Sylvain has the presence of mind to try and look as sorry as he feels. “Felix—”

“Shut up. So what— you have the courage to come out as long as it’s in a tiny room with two other people, but you can’t own up in your actual life? It’s okay for you to be gay, but suddenly when people can figure out it’s with a fucking _camboy_, it’s not?”

“What?” Sylvain snarls against his will, because he’s been an asshole, but it’s unfair of Felix to treat him like this, not after everything that’s happened in the month they’ve known each other. “So that guy _knows_?”

“What does it matter?” Felix’s laugh is a bitter carbon dioxide scoff taking shape between them. “Suddenly, you’re caring so much about your reputation?”

And oh, how Sylvain wishes he could make him understand — that it’s not about his reputation, at all, that it’s not even about Felix himself; that the defense mechanisms he’s built around him for his whole life are still kicking in like instinct, a knee-jerk reaction against the envy and the greed and himself—

But he can’t, because there’s another wall building itself brick by unwanted brick in response to Felix’s anger, another gut impulse surging out, and Sylvain does as he’s always done in this kind of situation: he says nothing as he tears his arm out of Felix’s grip, and walks away and out of sight.

===

“I fucked up.”

“I know.”

“I fucked up _real bad_.”

“I know. I think we all know, since it’s the seventeenth time you’ve said these exact words in the five minutes you’ve been here.”

Sylvain looks up, from the palm of his hands where he’s buried his face, at the expressions of the three girls before him. Dorothea, at least, seems to be trying her hardest to pretend to be understanding. Ingrid appears increasingly annoyed. Hilda looks utterly unconcerned.

“To be fair,” the latter says, twirling an idle strand of bubblegum pink hair around a perfectly manicured finger, “I think the guy kinda blew this out of proportion. Not something to interrupt Monthly Girl Night over.”

Dorothea’s face twists as her green eyes narrow, darkened by her long eyelashes and her undying loyalty to her friends. “Well, I don’t think I’d take it too well either if I was on a _date_ with someone and they stood me up as soon as a random person saw me with them.”

“It wasn’t a _date_—”

“Oh, Sylvain, please,” Dorothea interrupts him with a roll of eyes she still manages to make only mildly irritated, and Sylvain obediently shuts up.

“Am I the only one who’s still trying to process the fact Sylvain was seeing someone and I had to learn that information through Dorothea?” Ingrid says between two careful sips of hot tea. She’d turned the lights back on and paused their movie upon Sylvain’s graceful arrival, as graceful as barrelling into her and Dorothea’s flat unannounced and throwing himself on the couch could be, and had said absolutely nothing as she’d gone to the kitchen to brew Sylvain’s favorite bergamot tea — which is probably why she’ll always remain Sylvain’s favorite across all lifetimes he’ll ever live through.

Hilda snorts daintily behind her hand. “So phone sex and texts with the guy who took his pictures for his interview now counts as_ seeing someone_.”

“Yes it does,” and it’s a feat, how Dorothea and Ingrid both say the exact words at the same time; Sylvain cannot wait for the entire world to see how they’re made exactly for each other once they get married, while he’ll just stand in the shadows alone forever.

He scoffs. “When you’re me, I guess it does, yeah.” There’s a weary sigh echoing through the room, and Sylvain does not realize it sipped out of his own mouth until the puff of air ripples the caramel surface of the tea in his cup. “I just… It’s hard, you know, because I wanted to punch that guy so bad. I wanted to scream at him to fuck off and die, and instead…” Instead, he had acted according to everyone’s expectations of him, again; had smiled and bent and evaded the pain that was threatening to cut his skin, in order to spare Felix the ordeal of dealing with it all, in order to forget how much it hurt himself.

There’s not a flicker of pity in Dorothea’s expression as she faces him, and he’s somehow incredibly relieved. “Yeah, and we’re not the ones you should tell that to.”

“I know that! You think I didn’t try?” He deciphers Hilda shift in a startle from the corner of his eye, at the sudden raise of his voice, at the lines cutting across his brow, and the oh-so-familiar thorns of self-loathing curl around his lungs and dig, dig, dig. “I’ve texted him for four whole days. I tried to call, too. He’s not answering. He’s not even been live for more than a week now.”

Ingrid’s brow furrows. “What do you mean, he’s not _been live_?”

Dorothea’s sip of tea is graceful, the curl of her lips around the rim mimicking a smile. “Felix does sex livecams on the side.”

Hilda bursts into laughter. “God, I can’t _wait_ to tell Claude.”

“You used to sell feet pics to random horny guys when we were in college.”

“Which is why camboy is a perfectly respectable side job,” Hilda answers Ingrid with the nudge of an elbow. “If anything, I have newfound respect for that booty call of yours, Sylvain. Please apologize to him so I can meet him and give him tips.”

“At the rate this is going, there’ll be no tips to be given.” The gulp of tea he drinks is searing in his throat; Sylvain wishes it would burn all feeling on its way down into his chest. “I just… thought I was allowed to have something_ nice_, for once. It just sucks to see I was mistaken. Again.”

“No,” Dorothea says, the steel in her voice softening the sharpness of her gaze, “I don’t think you were.”

Ingrid looks at her, then, eyes ablaze with the muted warmth of love, before she turns to him. “I haven’t seen you so torn up over someone in literal years, Sylvain.” Her smile is tiny and brilliant with a thousand synonyms for kindness. “I think it counts for something, doesn’t it?”

Sylvain has spent the integrality of his existence giving up on people and running away from things and disallowing himself the very feeling of want altogether, and Sylvain realizes that he’s exhausted of giving up and running away and disallowing himself, and Sylvain decides that yes, it must count for something, after all.

Fear dissolves into resolve the way it does in the bad teen movies Hilda loves so much; he silently reaches for his phone, drawing the starry pattern that unlocks it over the screen, and opens his conversation with Felix. He’s already plenty apologized in the grey bubbles fading away above the keyboard, so he settles for a simple_ I need to talk to you. Please._

_no_, is the only answer he gets, tolling like doom along the fakely-cheery ringtone of his text message app.

“Well, at least he answered, this time,” Sylvain tries, but the light in his voice is strangled and silenced by the weight of the two, tiny letters, their sphericity winding around his throat like a noose.

“You guys are fucking ridiculous,” Dorothea sibilates as she rises from her spot on the floor and reaches for her own phone, “you and Felix alike. God, and _we_ thought we were disasters.”

The dialling A-tuned tone that echoes is muffled as she puts her phone to her ear, before sundering in the middle as someone picks up.

“Fe.” She says, like a summons, like a sentence. “I’m only going to say this once, because I’m your _and_ Sylvain’s friend. I do not _care _about whatever trauma prevents both of you from dealing with this like the adults that you are. But Sylvain wants to talk things out for probably the only time in his life, and if you don’t at least hear him out, I _swear_ to you, Felix Hugo Fraldarius, that I’m going to tell him about the thing you least want him to know. Have a good night.”

A hush falls over the room following Dorothea’s outburst when she hangs up, the calm after the storm. Judging from the expression on her face, Ingrid has never been more in love, and Sylvain is almost certain she’s going to ask her to marry her right there and then. However, that would probably be too good a distraction from the matter at hand, and Ingrid is still, apparently, somewhat mad at him, because the stare she gives him tells him she won’t be doing him this favor.

“Can I just say, Thea,” Hilda says, awestruck, “I so wish you were single right now.”

Ingrid throws a pillow to Hilda’s face, and there’s laughter like a whirlwind across the room, and his phone buzzes against his thigh to signal a text message — _tomorrow_, and an address, and a timestamp — and for a single second everything is right with the world.

===

Felix’s building door looms before him like purgatory gates, except more wooden and decrepit, the sheen of varnish flaking away at the corners from time and overuse. He’s five minutes early; he’s figured he’d better be, because he did not want to risk making Felix angrier than he already was, so he ended up pacing in his flat for thirty minutes straight because he’d never taken more than ten minutes to get ready for anything — thirty minutes spent in the hem and haw of rumination as he pondered the upcoming confrontation, scrivening dozens upon dozens of possible scenarios in his adrenalined mind, ranging from Felix kissing him and dragging Sylvain right into him to muffling his voice through the never-to-be-opened door as he told Sylvain he wished he never met him.

And so he finds himself here, after putting on his shoes and walking sluggishly through his neighborhood, the December wind whipping cold across his face for the four minutes and thirteen seconds in-between their two flats, in front of this building not dissimilar to Sylvain’s own. He inputs the door code Felix texted him earlier — a simple series of digits and an intercom number, which he doesn’t bother ringing when he finds the glass door held open by a stack of cardboard boxes, and he almost wonders who in their right mind moves away from home the day before New Year’s Eve at almost 6:30pm, who would have the guts for such a drastic change heralding an uncertainly-better new year. Instead, he stops thinking altogether, focuses on the soft creaking of his footsteps on the wooden staircase as he climbs up. _First floor, the door on the right,_ Felix had texted him, and he takes a deep breath and a deeper plunge as he knocks on the door, a rapid-paced triple-meter rasp of knuckles, punctuated by the single beat of an exhale when he readies himself and his head breaks the water.

“Felix, I’m so sorry,” he starts saying as the door opens softly, because if the words don’t come out now he fears they won’t ever get out at all, “and I know you probably don’t want to forgive me but—”

He cuts himself when someone who is definitely not Felix comes into view.

He levels a man of roughly his height and stature, except more unkempt, like someone has pulled apart the seams of him and tugged on the small threads jutting out and he’s desperately trying to sew them back together. Wild blonde hair half-falls into azure eyes and cuts straight along an angular jaw, tangling translucent into the stubble there. He’s handsome, Sylvain notices, in a way people are when they used to be universally beautiful before they let dark days and darker people get to them — there’s still a glint of something like recognition as he stares at Sylvain, although he’s not quite sure it’s the same kind of recognition people usually honor him with.

His eyes — well, the one that’s not hidden by his hair, anyway — widen in an approximation of a moon reflecting off a lake, and the man would seem sheepish, were it not for his broad frame wrapped in a warm, navy cloak and a white woolen scarf. “I’m sorry, I was just leaving anyway. Good luck, or… you know.”

_I didn’t know Felix had a boyfriend_, he almost says, black and spiteful and miasmic; but the tar doesn’t drip past his lips and coats the inside of his mouth instead, dries his throat and weighs his tongue into sticky silence, because it’s unfair of him, he _knows_ it’s unfair of him, Felix doesn’t owe him anything and will never owe his miserable existence a single thing—

“It’s alright, I can—” he steps aside as the man hurriedly makes his way into the hallway and down the stairs, embarrassment tinting his cheek in watered-down poppy. “... come back later…”

“No,” another voice says — _Felix’s_ voice, Sylvain hears, saturated in pique and hurry and a tiny hint of desperation, and it’s almost scary, how Sylvain drowns in the sound after just a few days of no-contact.

Felix is a sight for sore eyes, too, his hair loose around his face where it isn’t clipped back with a silver clasp, his coat open over a large sweater and a dark pair of skin-tight jeans; but it’s the look in his eyes, annoyance and alleviation and ambivalence mixed-up dark-and-stormy, that makes Sylvain wish to kiss him senseless right there and then.

“Hey,” he breathes instead, lets the sigh flume along the soft curve of Felix’s face.

“Meet Dimitri,” Felix says, aggravated, as he grabs a scarf off the wall next to him and winds it around his throat. “My childhood friend.”

Sylvain’s chest, clogged-up and breath-short, heaves as he speaks without thinking. “So, not your boyfriend.”

“What.” Felix’s glare is the most tempestuous he’s ever leveled him with, as though his wit just refuses to comprehend the words Sylvain’s let out. Keys clink against each other as Felix takes them in his hand. “What. No. Have you seen his hair? Some people have _standards,_ Sylvain.”

“Where are you going?”

Felix glances to the side, as though he’s dancing a freestyle waltz and carefully pondering his next steps. “We never did go for coffee, after all.”

Sylvain chuffs half a laugh as Felix closes the door behind him, and says nothing when he follows him down the stairs and into the evening.

There’s a tiny woman, serving them coffee to go, who stares daggers at Felix, strangely, when they go to one of the coffee shops Sylvain has always walked past and never actually entered before; her gaze pierces through the milky vapors curling arabesques in the winter air, never wavering from Felix, and Sylvain wonders if she’s a woman spurned, somehow, before he remembers that not everyone is the same as he is.

“That guy insulted my pastries,” the woman says, probably to Sylvain, although her eyes still are focused on Felix with the precision of a dart flying bullseye to its aim in the middle of his forehead.

“I’ll buy you ten of them, next time,” Sylvain answers with a wink as he grabs his cup in turn.

“You should. Maybe he’ll like them better if you feed them to him.”

“_And_ we’re leaving. Good day, Lysithea.”

The woman only pulls her tongue at him as they walk away, and Sylvain catches up with Felix in three whole strides. He has longer legs, but Felix is surprisingly fast, although he does slow his pace once they’ve turned the corner and wander up the cobbled street.

“So,” Sylvain says after a searing sip of coffee, burning his tongue into courage, “Hugo is actually your middle name?”

Felix snorts, surprisingly, and Sylvain does not feel as much as a disaster as he was half a second ago. “Don’t make me regret this,” he immediately adds, but there’s semi-sweetness there, like the melted chocolate at the bottom of Sylvain’s cup, chaser to the bitterness of the roast. It breaks the ice, mostly; easily enough, too, in a way Sylvain fears, as though they’ve already somehow forgiven the other a little.

Maybe it is the case, he thinks, as he feels his knuckles brush against Felix’s, an undestined touch, a lucky accident. Felix’s skin is cold, and Sylvain wants to warm it against his lips and the ghost of his breath, and he lets the incident happen again another time and another and another.

“I’m sorry,” he starts again, wintry wind frosting the words along the syllables. “I shouldn’t have left you there. I’ve been an asshole.”

“Yeah, you were,” Felix answers in a sigh Sylvain dares hope to be relieved. “And I was, too. I shouldn’t have lashed out like that.”

“It was the happiest I’ve felt in a while, you know. The museum.”

There’s the softest of scrapes as Felix stops walking and looks up at him, rosy lips parted on precious breath, and in the tungsten glow of the streetlights his eyes shine almost gold.

Here, in the evening-yellow highlighting each of the imperfections of them, dressed-up and cooled-down, Felix looks stunning and a dozen other adjectives that Sylvain wants to speak right against his tongue and the rest of him; he keeps on explaining, instead, as he starts walking again. “I thought about what you said and— and you’re right. I did care too much about my reputation, as weird as it can seem. Old habits die hard, I guess. But… I realized it’s not worth it.” It’s not worth _you_, is what he wants to say, probably preposterous and truer than any feeling he has ever felt, at least the positive ones. “And yeah, I’m a coward, I’ve always been a coward. But I think I’m done lying, and especially to myself.”

Felix buries his nose inside his scarf, looks everywhere but at him. “That’s good. Probably.”

“It’s because of you, you know. Partly.”

Felix rolls his eyes, and they catch molten copper in the movement. “So glad I was _partly_ responsible for your enlightenment.”

“I wasn’t lying then,” Sylvain lets himself say, the confession lost in the air and the smile he lets slide on his face, lets dimple his cheeks. “When I said I met someone who made me want to make bad decisions.” He doesn’t let himself look at Felix’s expression, keeps on talking like the next words will erase the frightening finality into the sentence he’s just spoken. “Anyway, I was worried, too. Since you… weren’t online.”

Felix huffs before taking a sip of his drink. “Dimitri came back to the city for Christmas, and has nowhere else to crash but my couch. I couldn’t decently do stuff like livecams while he was in the next room.”

Sylvain whirls around to face him, walks backwards down the cold, dry pavement, his feet almost floating with the lightness of his heart. “You know, some of your viewers are probably into that.”

“Some of my viewers are also disgusting,” Felix says, but there’s a smirk on his face as he raises an eyebrow, a spark in his gaze as he stares at Sylvain, all heated glass. “Good God, you’re _insatiable_.”

“Only for you,” Sylvain replies with the facility only veracity allows, and his head spins like an old 45’s when Felix takes a step forward and kisses him.

Cold, scarred fingers cup Sylvain’s cheek in the gentlest engraving; Sylvain could probably feel the scarred-sky cicatrices etching into his skin if he wasn’t so focused on the feeling of Felix’s lips on his, frost-rough and chapstick-smooth at once. Felix must stand on his toes, because he easily slots his nose along Sylvain’s, and Sylvain steadies him with an arm sliding behind his waist and pushing him deeper into him; he nips at Felix’s lower lip, and drinks the sigh that spills along Felix’s tongue in careful, open-mouthed kisses, his other hand brushing into Felix’s hair as Felix’s nails cinch into Sylvain’s coat.

Felix remains close when they pull apart, dark eyelashes fanning open on darker eyes in the lack of light, and Sylvain kisses him again, slow to touch and quick to break away, before red hair tangles into ebony as he rests his forehead against Felix’s.

“Your hands are cold,” Sylvain says as he curls his fingers above Felix’s along the side of his jaw.

The laughter Felix exhales winnows against Sylvain’s lips. “Nah, you’re the one who’s freakishly warm.”

“We could go to my place. If you’re cold,” Sylvain adds quickly when the gleam in Felix’s gaze disappears upwards in mock-exasperation. “We could have dinner or something.”

“Or something,” Felix repeats, raising an eyebrow, but he lets himself being pulled along as Sylvain entwines their fingers and starts walking towards his flat half-backwards, down the street he had wandered into that night when they last called each other. The tug inside his heart when he spots Felix’s half-smile is strangely reminiscent of the tug he currently has on Felix’s hand, as though his whole body is harmonizing to the magnetic pull he feels towards Felix, has felt since he’s first seen him on that disreputable porn site.

He only releases Felix’s hand to reach for his keys once they reach his door, swiping the entry pass across the door codes, holding the framed glass open for Felix to pass through until the pane fogs up under his fingerprints. Neither of them say anything, have not said anything for a few minutes, time and space blurred like frost on car windows, air voltaic around any place they have yet to touch; the ring of the elevator call echoes electric blue down the dim hallway, the sound of feet stomping down the old staircase drumming irregular as they wait for the lift, and he feels Felix’s gaze on his back like a windburn, like a brand. It feels comforting, in a way these kinds of gazes rarely are — perhaps it’s because he’s used to them by now, or perhaps he’s getting a little bit better at indifference.

Or perhaps it is none of these, and Felix is just that different.

“What floor?” Felix says as they enter the tiny lift; it had been inconvenient, to move in here, because the elevator was an inch too narrow to fit most of Sylvain’s bigger furniture.

“4th floor,” Sylvain answers, and he’s grateful for the size of the damned thing when Felix has to move a little bit closer in order to let the doors close around them.

The lift starts moving up at the same time Felix surges into Sylvain and crashes their lips together again.

The kiss is better, more desperate, which means Sylvain can put that much more emotion into it; he loses himself in the feeling of Felix’s fingers threading thunder into his hair, weaves unspoken declarations of infatuation against Felix’s mouth, presses Felix all the closer as his hands curl around his ass. Felix kisses him like he’s wanted to kiss him his whole life, kisses him like Sylvain’s always needed to be kissed, unforgiving as he bites Sylvain’s lip before smoothing the sting with a semi-shy swipe of tongue, and when Sylvain hums a low tune of contentment that shivers against his lips, Felix pushes his thigh into the gap between Sylvain’s legs and sighs a swear.

It’s too perfect to be anything but divine, to be anything but sinful, the way they fit together, which is probably why the elevator slowly eases to a stop and noisily opens over Sylvain’s floor, a demonic intervention forcing them apart for the couple of seconds it takes to slide his key into the lock and ushering them in.

It’s Felix who closes the door behind them, pushes himself against it and makes it slam through the hallway as he winds careful hands into the lapels of Sylvain’s coat. “Still wanna get dinner?”

Sylvain’s fingers find their rightful place once more, around the sharp angles of Felix’s hips through the thick winter cloak. “Not really,” he answers. He’s hungry, though not for food.

“Good.” He feels the word against his lips more than he hears it, because Felix is kissing him again, slower this time, like they have an entire eternity to be doing this. Maybe they do, Sylvain lets himself think as he grinds against Felix, or maybe they only have this one time before Felix vanishes out of his life like everyone he’s ever let come too close; in this very moment, it matters very little, Sylvain finds, matters infinitely less than the soar of his heartbeat and the rush of his blood as he unravels Felix’s ponytail like he would a ribbon on a Christmas morning, matters almost nothing compared to the feeling of Felix’s hair slipping through his fingers in the exact way he’s dreamt of ever since he first saw him, and when Felix moans into his mouth Sylvain figures it matters more than he thought, because he wishes he could hear the voice every second for the rest of his entire, undeserving life.

It’s nothing like what Sylvain has ever done with his other conquests; there’s no setting the mood, no candlelight and sweet music and saccharine scent to conceal the anaesthetic dripping dissatisfaction onto the bodies below him. There’s only the taste of Felix’s lips and the sound of Felix’s sighs and the sight of Felix’s expression, mirroring his disappointment to part for even a moment in order to open the bedroom door and pull them in. Felix pushes him onto the mattress, and there’s a different kind of lust than the one Sylvain is used to, in Felix’s eyes, one infused with the sweetness of yearning and the tartness of ardency, wine dregs at the bottom of burgundy irises; Sylvain drinks it like ambrosia when Felix crawls over him and rakes his nails from his chest to his hair, undoes the seam of Felix’s lips with his tongue as he undoes Felix’s coat and pushes it down from his shoulders. Their kisses become clumsy, more spit and teeth than anything else and noticeably the best Sylvain has ever tasted, as Felix unbuttons their clothes and leaves them in a heap on the floor — coats and scarves, shirts half-wrinkled with the way they’ve clung to each other, shoes scattered across the room as they’ve carelessly kicked them off, until Felix deftly undoes Sylvain’s jeans and pulls them down, torturous, the stretch of fabric burning Sylvain’s thighs the same way Felix’s lips burn marks and bites into his neck.

“Off,” Felix orders against his lips, and Sylvain has the desperate hope it’s because he, too, cannot bear to ever stop kissing him, even if it’s to remove his pants — so Sylvain pushes himself up onto the mattress, and the heat of Felix’s tongue as it catches against his incisors makes it almost impossible to do anything else than ripping them off.

As soon as Sylvain’s jeans hit the floorboards, Felix’s fingers coax him back onto the half-undone sheets, and his amber eyes melt like copper in the faded evening light, drip lust-colored onto the lines of Sylvain’s body, set like cooling bronze into the jut of his bones and the ridges of his muscles. _Fuck_, Felix breathes, his fingers tracing reverence onto Sylvain’s thighs, over Sylvain’s chest, along Sylvain’s arms, and Sylvain cannot help the smirk that sparks onto his face. “Like what you see?” he says, because he has no sense of self-preservation, and Felix gives him no answer but a rough, searing kiss as he crash-falls into him and their erections grind together. Sylvain’s hands leave the softness of Felix’s long, long hair for the firm curve of his ass, nails digging into flesh; _you don’t know_, Felix whispers between exhales,_ you don’t know_, and the scrape of canines against the pulse point in his throat is almost enough to make Sylvain forget he’s always been curious by nature.

Sylvain has always hated what he couldn’t know. “Don’t know what?”

Felix’s breath catches when he hears the way Sylvain’s voice rings faint at a particularly good thrust, and his gaze is just spoonfuls of treacle as he rises over Sylvain’s shape. “How long I’ve wanted to have you like this.”

Sylvain laughs to better hide the sheer effect the words have on him. “A least a month, I’d guess?”

Felix raises an eyebrow as he considers Sylvain’s words, before fanning chaste kisses along Sylvain’s neck, down to his collarbone. “Oh, _Sylvain_.” Felix shapes the syllables of his name into Sylvain’s torso, down the line between his ribs, onto the soft skin over his hipbones. He files his nails against Sylvain’s thighs, bringing them up, up, up, until they’re just shy of digging into the silky skin below his ass. “I didn’t even know, but I’ve wanted you for_ years_,” and Felix mouths the word against his cock through his boxers.

_What_, Sylvain wants to say, but _fuck_ is what comes out of his mouth instead, the wetness of Felix’s tongue against the fabric as he sucks onto the tip making Sylvain reach for the lube on the bedside table.

“I’ve wanted you,” Felix continues, the flicker of his tongue and lips over his cock slow like a torture session, “ever since I saw that underwear ad. Every day,” his fingers dip below the waistline of his boxers, tease at the thin expanse of skin there, so close to the now-dripping tip of his dick, “since I was fifteen.” Sylvain unceremoniously drops the bottle of lube onto the mattress as Felix finally,_ finally_ slides his underwear down his legs, and Sylvain feels the flutter of a heated sigh against his sensitive tip. “I’ve imagined you,” and Sylvain pushes himself up on a weak elbow, and he’s almost trembling now even though the room is so, so warm; “I’ve imagined me fucking you, you fucking me. Me… sucking you off,” Felix admits as he curls his white, scarred fingers around Sylvain’s cock like he’s one of Sylvain’s fever dreams, one of Sylvain’s locked-up desires.

For a single moment, Sylvain wonders if Felix, too, has imagined them walking down a cold street holding hands, waking up curled up against each other, dying at each other’s side — so vivid it has always felt more like a memory to him, until Felix’s lips close on the tip of his cock and Sylvain can no longer wonder anything at all.

Felix’s tongue laps at the head, pace leisurely like he’s savoring every moment of it, and the feeling of Felix’s fingers etching up and down the length along Sylvain’s piercings is the closest to a religious experience he has ever felt. Sylvain throws his head back on a moan as Felix sucks on the tip, his cock sinking a little deeper into Felix’s mouth, and Felix pulls it out to lick at the precum trickling onto the barbells pierced through the underside. The tip of his tongue trips against the metal as he makes his way up again, and Felix looks right into Sylvain’s eyes as he swallows his cock and _sucks_.

Sylvain can’t do anything but swear as he watches his length disappear, step by jeweled step, between Felix’s lips, his palm curling around the base and moving in time with the brush of his mouth, tongue heating up the steel of Sylvain’s piercings as it teases the bells, before his cock slides out again, spit dripping along the sides before Felix pulls him in again. One of Sylvain’s hand travels down to tangle into Felix’s hair, easing him along with the barest of push-and-pull, and Sylvain’s moans are soon echoed by the purr of delight Felix makes ripple against the skin.

“Which one— did you want to do first?”

Felix hums in question as he looks up at Sylvain, eyebrow raised, mouth full of his cock, and the sight almost enough to make Sylvain come right here.

“Me fucking you, you fucking me — which one?”

Felix releases him, lips spit-wet and fuck-rough over the sharpness of his smile. “If I had to say,” he says as though taking his time to remember, his hand idly thumbing over Sylvain’s tip before dragging the skin down and up and down again, “probably me fucking you. Why?”

Sylvain wordlessly throws the bottle of lube in his general direction. “Please,” he says, and his voice sounds as wrecked as he feels, “_please_, fuck me, Felix.”

Felix’s eyes widen, almost in surprise, but the spark of desire that lights up his irises in the night light soon drowns any other emotion. “That’s funny. Most people only want to fuck _me_, not the other way round.”

How funny, Sylvain thinks, how alike they are. After all, most people only want Sylvain to fuck them, as well.

“You’re in luck, then.” His smile is so wide and bright it hurts. “I’m not most people.”

Felix’s mouth drops open on a small sigh, his face unreadable as he searches for _something_ in Sylvain’s expression, and Sylvain is about to ask him what’s wrong when Felix rises to him and brushes his fingers against his throat.

“Yeah,” Felix agrees in a sigh over Sylvain’s lips, “I guess you’re not.”

Sylvain’s eyes slide close as they kiss again, idle and tender, all brushes of lips and swallowed sighs and half-smiles, and Felix’s smile is sweet and almost gentle when they part. “After all,” and his smile turns into a teasing grin, “you’re just a tall redhead with brown eyes.”

Sylvain snorts as he playfully pushes him off his frame. “I knew you only wanted me for my body.”

“I don’t,” Felix replies instantly, and it’s so sincere that Sylvain’s heart shatters beneath his bones. His skin feels too fragile as Felix caresses it, as though the scars and blisters he’s worn under his chest are finally surfacing and cutting him open, as though if he prods enough Felix would be able to dig his fingers in and tear him from the inside out and leave him to bleed all the feeling away, and if this is what falling in love is like, Sylvain almost wishes he could go back to blissful ignorance.

“I want you,” Felix goes on, and there’s the peach edge of a flush upon his cheeks, although whether it is from exertion or from embarrassment Sylvain isn’t sure. “All of you.” His hands dance on Sylvain’s chest again and dodge every invisible crevice as he goes back down, taking the bottle along. “I want to know more about you,” he keeps on as he warms lube in between his fingers, his other hand back to Sylvain’s cock in slow, precise pumps, until he licks another stripe up the length. He’s rubbing slick hands in circles between his inner thighs, and Sylvain desperately wants to push onto his fingers, to feel them filling him up, to feel the drag of his hole against the knuckles. “About the expressions you can wear,” he says as he teases at the rim, dragging his nail against the muscle there, “about”, and he finally sinks a finger in, “the sounds you can make,” and Sylvain’s head falls back onto the pillow with a swear.

Felix pushes his finger into him, careful, to the second knuckle, before he curls it as he drags it out, leaving barely the tip inside until he thrusts inside again, harder and more sudden, and Sylvain feels an exhilarated grin break onto his face. “Did you prepare yourself?”

Sylvain laughs. “I’m always ready for every possibility, sweetheart.”

Felix clicks his tongue at the nickname and slides a second finger into him, fucking him rougher. “Maybe I should make you forget any word other than my name.”

Sylvain does not even have the time to agree before Felix pushes in again, and his hands curl pale chiffon into the sheets as Felix spreads him open — the sound of his fingers inside him is wet and filthy, lube dripping from his hole onto the warmth of Felix’s hand, and when Felix licks at his cock and sucks on the head in time with his thrusts Sylvain is half-reduced to stupidity, his tongue curving around single words like _fuck _and _god_ and_ yes, yes, yes, Felix_ — the third finger burns with the sweetness of hot tea as Felix curls them, before Sylvain thrusts shallowly into Felix’s open mouth, and his tongue licks at the tip at the same time Felix’s fingers find his prostate and Sylvain suddenly sees stars.

“Condom, now,” Felix demands as he abruptly pulls away, and Sylvain is almost disappointed, until he sees Felix’s other hand frantically pumping his own dick, thick and slick with precum and not simply a blurry camera image; he pulls the bedside table drawer open and throws a packet at Felix, who deftly catches it and tears it open, and Sylvain grips his own cock to the sight of Felix unrolling the condom over his length and lazily lubing himself up. Sylvain catches Felix’s gaze travelling from his spread legs up his chest and to his face; Felix kneels between his legs, forehead falling onto Sylvain’s as he positions himself.

“Sylvain,” Felix breathes in the space between them, almost a plea to a god, and Sylvain cannot help but repeat_ yes, love, I’m here_, and Felix muffles Sylvain’s moan with a kiss as he pushes his cock into him.

Sylvain breathes all the oxygen he needs directly from Felix’s mouth as Felix fucks him, a slow roll of hips like the lap of midnight waves, and Sylvain wonders if Felix feels as good as he does, filled and full and _whole_. Felix rewinds a hand into Sylvain’s hair and pulls as he pushes in again, and another whisper of his name cascades out of Sylvain’s lips as Felix sinks in to the base of his dick; Felix’s smirk bites into Sylvain’s lower lip as he pulls out almost completely and slams into him again, the sound of their moans attuned and arranged for an audience of none, and it dawns onto Sylvain that at this very instant, Felix is his and his alone. _You feel so good_, Felix murmurs into his ear as he picks up the pace, his thrusts rougher, Sylvain’s hole clenching around his cock so that he can feel all of Sylvain the way Sylvain feels all of him, _so tight for me, only for me_, and Sylvain’s hands find Felix’s ass and push him deep inside as he confirms, _only for you, always for you, fuck, fuck, _fuck—

Felix props himself up on his arms and hands, the twin tattoos over his hipbones pitch black against his skin and another proof that he’s truly here, it’s truly him, _his_ Felix, and the tip of his cock brushes deep against that spot that makes Sylvain lose all comprehension — Sylvain keens, his back arching up as Felix swears and grips his hips, fucks him hard and fast, sweat like dew clinging to his skin, long hair stuck to his forehead and shoulders, the sweetest vision he has ever seen. Sylvain threads the fingers of his left hand in the spaces between Felix’s own as he urges him on, _yes, like this, just like this_, saying his name again and again until he’s lost any sense he still had and shortens _Felix_ to _Fe, Fe, Fe_, and Felix comes with a strangled swear, his cock pulsing around Sylvain’s hole and deep inside him as he clenches around him.

Felix fucks him through his own orgasm, at the same erratic pace, his other hand releasing Sylvain’s hip to curl around him and pump him to the rhythm of his thrusts, _I want you to come on my cock, only with my cock_, and Sylvain feels the tip push into his prostate once, twice, thrice until he’s pulled into his climax and shoots his cum all over Felix’s hand.

Sylvain feels empty, when Felix pulls out, but incredibly fulfilled, in a way he’s rarely been; perhaps it’s because Felix merely throws the condom somewhere for them to care about tomorrow and lets himself fall into Sylvain’s arms in another kiss, running fingers through the hair he’s pulled at earlier as though asking for forgiveness, letting his hand rest against Sylvain’s chest where it felt too many things at once like searching for his quieting heartbeat. Felix lets his head fall into Sylvain’s neck, trailing love in lazy kisses, legs tangled together in the dirty, undone sheets. Sylvain lets his fingers run along the curve of Felix’s spine, lets his nails catch against the jut of bones he can feel underneath the pale, soft skin, tastes tremors and himself on Felix’s tongue as Felix cranes his head up to kiss him.

“So. Dinner?” Sylvain says, because he desperately wants Felix to stay here but knows better than to ask.

Felix huffs a soft, soft laugh. “That’s what you invited me here in the first place, right?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next AND LAST CHAPTER: what do you mean this is a Lighthearted AU and not a place for me to write Essays About Society's Expectations On People's Sexuality And Relationships


	4. let's just stop and think before i lose face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Felix considers it now, in the shadows the balcony walls provide, whether Sylvain would still have been into him had they only been photographer and photographed, in that tiny storage office — had they only been friends of friends, meeting for the first time at a New Year’s Eve party none of them would have been obliged to attend.   
No, Felix’s mind concludes, Sylvain probably wouldn’t have — for who would take one look at Felix as he appears in his daily life, more thorns than roses and still hoping to tear oneself apart over them — but it’s so, so easy to forget when Felix buries his hand in Sylvain’s hair and pulls him down to bite on his lips, when Sylvain pulls Felix against him by the hips and trails warm fingertips over his spine, when Felix pushes Sylvain against the balcony wall for more stolen kisses that make their glasses drop on the floor and spill sticky over the tiles."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow. I just cannot believe this AU is over. It started from something so dumb, and gathered so much support anyway, and is now close to 50.000 words. I'd like to thank all of you, first of all, SO MUCH for supporting me and following this stupid idea and giving it so much love. You guys were my light in the moments when I was doubting myself the most, and I cannot thank you enough for the love and the support.
> 
> Big thanks also to everyone who beta'd this fic for me, most importantly Demmy and Cherry. You guys know I never proofread anything in my life and love me anyway. Other thanks for the whole sylvix server NSFW-channel residents for pushing me to write this and being my reluctant sounding boards and cheerleaders!!
> 
> I did a playlist for the whole fic, here's the link: shorturl.at/cimUZ
> 
> I hope you like this last chapter and that you think it's a good way to let them finally have the happiness they both deserve - and for Felix's birthday, no less!

Dimitri haunts his hallway like a hushful hallucination, edges iridescent as his hands twist and untwist from the hairtie he winds between his knuckles in a springy spacenet. He’s at the foot of Felix’s door like an abandoned dog, hair disheveled in a way only sleepless, sexful nights can muster, his bangs falling back along his forehead when he hears Felix’s footsteps and raises his gaze to him, black-rimmed like oversteeped tea on the edges of a porcelain cup. He’s holding a bag of what look like pastries in his hand. Felix hates sweet things.

“Don’t worry,” Dimitri says as though he has a say in what Felix chooses to feel, but perhaps he’s merely reading the irritation bleeding from Felix’s own stare. “I ate all of them. There’s only one left.”

_Of course there is_, Felix thinks, because Dimitri is too proper and polite to be selfish, yet another contradiction in their personalities. He does not bother answering as he unlocks the door to his flat.

The crinkle of paper is the sole indication that Dimitri has made his way to the tiny kitchen corner, dropping the croissant into place before the microwave turns on like a supernatural apparition, Dimitri always doing his best to make himself smaller in Felix’s presence ever since their teenage years, even after all of Felix’s long-come, late-night apologies. It makes Felix feel angry in an awful, painful, self-directed way, and so he chooses to vent his ire through a bite of pastry once the timer rings and he half-burns his fingers pulling it out.

“I’m sorry.” Dimitri sags into Felix’s couch, weariness melting off him like wax into the plush cushions. Felix hates that he’s the one who apologizes, as though it had been him, and not Felix, to leave the other alone in the wintrous hallway.

“Why?” Felix asks instead, testing his own patience.

“I’m an idiot.”

Felix raises an eyebrow, because surely forgetting to ask for the keys is not Dimitri’s usual brand of idiocy, not when Felix has seen the man try and walk on a wall over a dusktime drunken dare. “That’s nothing new, is it?” He dares say it because he feels like he can, now, feels as though many bridges have been burned and extinguished with the proverbial water for him to be able to tease him like this again, though part of his mind always remains aware of the danger in going too far, of the word that sometimes keeps running through his brain when he wants to speak Dimitri’s name.

Dimitri threads gold-ringed fingers through golden hair as he sighs, his gaze trying too hard to study the ceiling mouldings. “He asked me to stay, and I left.”

Felix’s hands stop tidying up his coat and scarf on the coat rack, and he whips around to stare at him. Dimitri chances a glace in his general direction, only to look immediately away, like a child who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Oh yeah,” Felix says, caustic, “you’re an idiot.” Felix had seen the way Dimitri had smiled when he’d come back from his night out, on the second day he’d been back in the city; he’d also seen the remnants of a phone number rubbed raw over Dimitri’s forearm in a desperate bid to get the ink out, he’d also heard the way Dimitri’s broken voice had waxed self-hatred in the dead of night and made Felix get out of bed to try and be a good friend for once and just listen. Felix merely sighs in irritation, because he knows how hard it is to feel deserving of things, how much work it is to accept oneself the way one is and not as an outward projection of what others wish one would be. “How long have you been waiting out there anyway? It’s cold outside.”

Dimitri doesn’t look at him. “... Three…”

“Three what?”

“Hours— _listen_,” Dimitri cuts short Felix’s exasperated protest, “I didn’t think you’d stay there, is all.” Dimitri looks at him again, more deliberate, more knowing, and Felix hates this look on him, hates the kind of self-satisfied, pretend-smart smile that’s just a few words short of _I told you so_, hates being reminded that his childhood friend can be as stubborn and hubristic as Felix himself. “You did, though,” he says like it's a certainty, like there’s never been a single time during each instance Felix has talked to him about Sylvain where he doubted it would end up this way. “What did you guys even do?”

_We fucked again, is what we did._

They’d fucked in the shower, after having eaten the dinner Sylvain had ordered for them because he’d told Felix he was too lazy and turned on to cook them anything, Felix’s sighs echoing against the tiled walls of Sylvain’s bathroom as Sylvain took them both in hand and got them off; they’d fucked in the middle of the night, when someone had sent Sylvain 4am texts ringing deafening through the quietude of the bedroom and Felix’s sleepy daze, and Felix had let himself curl against Sylvain’s back as Sylvain answered the text, until his phone lay abandoned on his night table in favor of Felix and him rutting against each other like horny teenagers; they’d fucked as they woke up, when Sylvain had made them coffee at 12pm and Felix had consciously sipped his drink naked until Sylvain’s fingers opened him up and pulled him apart right on the kitchen counter, holding back his moans when Dimitri had called him to tell him he was stuck outside his flat and didn’t have the keys.

“There’s a party at Dorothea’s tonight, for New Year’s Eve,” Sylvain had breathed against Felix’s temple once he’d finished him with his tongue and mouth and Felix had thoroughly tasted himself against Sylvain’s lips. “Come with me?”

The question had surprised him, and Felix could have almost seen the way his eyes had widened reflected in the mirror-glaze of Sylvain’s honey gaze; it was an unexpected request, so simply spoken it had made his heart skip a couple beats and tumble down the stairs of his ribs, as though a night and a half of sex warranted Felix the right to be Sylvain’s date anywhere, as though he could somehow be worthy of it. Sylvain probably had other intentions, he’d wondered, probably thought of bringing him home afterwards and let Felix touch him under the low lights of unseen, distant fireworks; still, it had made him smile, unbidden, foolish and naive and perhaps a little bit hopeful, and so he’d quickly hidden it behind his usual mask of cynicism. “Have I already fucked your brains out to the point where you don’t remember Dorothea is also _my_ friend?” Felix had bitten his smirk against Sylvain’s throat before he’d reached up to Sylvain’s lips and left a kiss there, cooling and chaste. “I’m already invited. Flattered, though,” and Sylvain’s mouth had found the crook of Felix’s shoulder to kiss it in turn, as though he hadn’t tasted every square centimeter of Felix’s body by then and still longed for more, still wanted to try every flavor of Felix’s skin and soul.

The remembrance makes Felix’s face flush freckled-sunburn. “I didn’t plan to,” he starts, and feels compelled into an explanation when he sees Dimitri raise an unconvinced eyebrow. “I was too tired to move, and Sylvain bought dinner, so I was _again _too tired and full of food—”

“Of food.”

“—of _food _to move, and I had to take a shower anyway, and then it was past ten and cold outside and—”

“Lix”, Dimitri says, gentle and laughing like a playground buzz, “you’re rambling.”

Felix has not rambled about anything since he was nine years old and his father chastised him for it, and they both know it, and that’s when Felix realizes he may have bitten off more than he could chew, may have kissed on less than could satisfy him.

“I hate you,” Felix replies, and winces, and it's a testament to how far they’ve come, that Dimitri only laughs the words off.

“I know.” Dimitri’s eyes shine with overwhelming kindness, one Felix feels he won’t ever deserve and therefore keeps pushing away, keeps refusing like an unwanted birthday present. “Felix, I’m glad for you. You deserve to be happy.” Felix takes another, angry bite of croissant, as though it would satiate the voice inside his head that screams Dimitri’s lying through his teeth, and Dimitri smiles again in self-satisfaction.

“So. A redhead, huh.”

“I am kicking you out of my house.”

===

“So. A redhead, huh.”

Word travels fast, Felix wonders at Ferdinand’s well-informed smile and perceptive stare; he imagines Sylvain told Ingrid, who probably told Dorothea, who probably told Caspar, who wouldn’t have told anyone — Dorothea’s best friend is apparently a surprisingly good secret keeper, considering everyone in their close circle still thinks Ingrid is merely Dorothea’s roommate and not her partner of three years — but if Linhardt had been there, Ferdinand obviously knows.

“So. A dark-haired guy who dresses all in black and looks like he hasn’t slept in three days, huh.”

Ferdinand has the gracefulness of conceding defeat at Felix’s reply. “I imagine we both have a type.”

Felix looks at Ferdinand’s boyfriend, a man looking like a crossbreed between the singer of Felix’s favorite emo band when he was seventeen and a sewer rat, and Felix would say there’s no accounting for taste, except the chimera in question is the exact reason why he and Ferdinand stopped fooling around half-a-dozen months ago and he feels a little insulted. It’s not as though Felix intended Ferdinand to be more than a simple outlet, the small hatch one flicks open on the pot when one wants to let out steam; if anything, Felix has always thought Aegir to be kind of vapid, always too enthusiastic, ready to throw caution to the wind if it allowed him to pursue his true calling in fashion design. He’s one of the better models Felix has photographed, though, this he can give to him — from the booking pictures Felix had shot of him to the actual ads and editorials he’s done with him, Ferdinand had always been consistent and hard-working, something that shone in the hundreds of photographs Felix had taken of him over the year. Ferdinand had taken one of Felix, once, of Felix’s mouth against the side of his cock before a half-drunk tryst, one that had ended up on his neglected camboy Twitter account and had garnered as many retweets as new subscribers that week.

Felix wonders if Sylvain has seen it; wonders if Sylvain has pictured himself in Ferdinand’s place, has imagined Felix mouthing along his own dick in replacement of his own fingers; wonders if Sylvain would take pictures of him, one day, would suspend his presence in digital immortality as proof that they were real.

“At least you’ll have no competition for the title of Most Beautiful Hair in that relationship.”

“Sadly enough, not everyone is blessed with your above-average looks and emotional instability.”

Felix laughs good-naturedly, because he recognizes good quips when he hears them, and they sip their drinks in companionable silence as they observe the room. Dorothea desperately tries to make Dimitri socialize with _Hubiekins_, as she calls him — the man must owe her an awful amount of favors, Felix thinks, for him to tolerate the nickname; a girl named Marianne seems incredibly shy for someone with electric blue hair, or perhaps it’s only that the people working at the animal shelter where Ingrid volunteers all have incredibly strange hair colors, Felix surmises when he spots Marianne speaking to a woman with bright, meadow-green hair — who looks both much younger and much older than any of the people in the living room; Caspar is shouting about a new TV show and drunkenly singing the dumb lyrics to the opening song along someone named Catherine, who is probably Ingrid’s boss or something similar, under the tired gaze of their respective partners — always-sleepy Linhardt and a woman with an amazing resting bitch face called Shamir, with whom Felix would probably get along like birds of a feather. Ingrid drops a pizza plate in Dimitri’s hands when she hears the ring of the doorbell along the hallway, and Felix has never seen Dimitri look so puzzled or lost, especially when Marianne takes advantage of his distress by stealing a slice from the plate and striking up a discussion. They’re the only two people not to have indulged in drinks since the party started, Felix has noticed; there’s probably a commonality for them to explore somewhere, and it would be good for Dimitri to have friends who’ll give him an incentive to come back to the city instead of wallowing God knows where in the south.

“Hey, darling,” Felix hears a now-familiar voice say from the open doorway, and his liquored-up mind resents the words themselves for being addressed to someone other than him.

Sylvain cuts a striking sight, as per usual, as much a vision in _hussard_-style monochrome button-up and plum sequined pants as completely disrobed, looking much more like a runway model who fled from glazed pictures than the actual runway models Felix sometimes shoots, and Felix feels very underdressed in his black-on-black-on-black outfit, though not in the way he’d like best. His red hair flies fresh out of fucks in feathery flourishes when he kisses Ingrid’s cheeks, a small woman with bubblegum-pink hair and a corseted dress pushing herself against his arm as she hands Ingrid two bottles of wine before she’s pulled back by another stray hand — Sylvain’s face is adorned with a smile, and a wink, and a gaze like he knows each of Felix’s darkest secrets as he turns to him, and Felix goes to fill up his glass again.

Sylvain greets everyone around the room like a campaigning politician, kissing everyone’s cheeks and giving personalized compliments to each and every one, the room filling up with the sound of his hellos and it’s-been-a-whiles and you-look-amazings in very much the same way the chatbox of Felix’s private cam show fills up on busy nights. He hugs Dorothea as he kisses the top of her head, shakes Caspar’s hand, lets his lips graze the back of Marianne’s hand with an exaggerated bow, introduces himself to Dimitri properly, and Felix chooses to ignore the rest when Ferdinand looks at him with laughter tinted hazel and a smile shining arrogant.

“The Gautier heir? Really? Congratulations are in order.”

“We’re not dating.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t.” Ferdinand’s voice takes on a deeper tone, the kind reserved for conspiracies and secrets in smoking rooms and hushed warnings. “Even back then, Gautier never was one to… date.”

Ferdinand knows everyone, so it’s no surprise that he must know who Sylvain is; still, in that humble living room, surrounded by some of his closest acquaintances, the use of his name feels alien and unwelcome, the picture of Sylvain’s face twisting fake during the interview whenever the syllables left Bernadetta’s mouth surfacing in Felix’s mind with the quiet desperation of an upcoming storm.

“His name is Sylvain, thank you.”

Ferdinand’s eyes turn into two overripe oranges at Felix’s words, before he bursts into laughter, and Felix tries to shush him with a pointed glare and a kick in the shin. “Sorry,” he says in-between big sips of oxygen and tiny, silly giggles, “I didn’t expect that from you. You’re adorable, truly.”

“Isn’t he?”

Sylvain’s voice caresses along Felix’s spine, and when Felix turns around to face him Sylvain’s gaze is the very color of candied apples and roses and danger, bleeding all over Felix and seeping through his pores. “Hey there,” Sylvain finally greets him, surprisingly restrained in closeness and touch. “Thought I’d save the best for last. Fancy seeing you here, Aegir!”

“We were in the same agency for a time,” Ferdinand explains airily, “something like seven years ago?”

Sylvain stretches his arms, curls his hands behind his head, taking as much space as he can in a single movement; Felix’s gaze catches on the sliver of skin that strikes pale right above his hipbone. “I don’t know. I don’t really keep track of my _rivals_.” The word is cadenced with a wink that brings out a noise of utter disgust out of Ferdinand’s mouth, and Felix muffles his own laughter with a mouthful of rum-and-coke.

“I’ll go and check whether Dorothea needs some help with the food,” Ferdinand evades, the epitome of poise and grace as he leaves their spot near the buffet table, in other words, the actual place where the food is. He makes a point of brushing a chaste kiss on his boyfriend’s cheek, his sole reward the most judgmental expression someone as lovestruck as Hubert seems to be able to make.

“What are you drinking?” Felix asks as he busies his hands with a glass and busies his gaze with any sight other than Sylvain’s distracting face.

“I don’t suppose you know how to make Hemingway Daiquiris?”

“Fuck off.”

Sylvain’s laughter mellifluouses in the receding space between them as he settles a hand on the table. “Rum and coke is just fine.”

The semblance of discussion is carelessly broken when Sylvain’s two friends stumble into the room with a loud, collective greeting, the girl from earlier rushing to ruffle Caspar’s hair while the man makes his way to them — to him, Felix realizes. Felix likes to think he has been blessed with good eyesight, which means he cannot help but notice the man is handsome; there’s an elegance in the carefully careless way he carries himself, telltale of hidden depths, and he’s suave as he shakes Felix’s hand, all bright teeth over olive skin and shrewd green eyes framed with dark lashes that flutter playfully when his smile does not reach completely up. _Claude_, the man introduces himself as, and there’s a hint of cognizance that tickles at Felix’s brain, a memory like blurred black lines on pale skin, until the man whirls around and corners a helpless Dimitri against the kitchen island with a _fancy seeing you here_, and Felix’s braincells seem to connect through the tipsy haze of his cocktail.

“Oh my god.” Sylvain’s snort sounds highly entertained as he holds back his laughter, having apparently arrived at the same conclusion as Felix. “I take it my best friend fucked your best friend?”

The spark in Sylvain’s gaze draws complicity and fondness out from Felix’s chest, and so Felix decides to humor him. “Actually, I think Claude’s the one who’s been taking it.”

Felix thinks the actual guffaw that trembles out of Sylvain shakes the walls of the room and startles Marianne, and his fingers find Sylvain’s wrist with frightening ease as he drags Sylvain outside on the balcony.

The apple of Sylvain’s throat seesaws along the breath of cold winter air he catches, and a remembrance coruscates through Felix’s mind, of his own tongue tracing the shape, of his own teeth biting the edge, of his own lips feeling Sylvain’s sighs in rippling reverberations. Felix averts his eyes to look at the rest of the balcony, curling around the walls in a metaphor of running away; he does not look back until Sylvain’s breathing has evened out and he hears the rustling of clothing. Sylvain is pulling a cigarette packet out of his pocket, his back propped up against the railing, his hair chocolate cosmos petals drifting along the neighboring lights, eyes cinnabar-charred when he lights up the tip into ashes before turning to barely-extinguished charcoal. The railing digs into Felix’s forearms in azote burns when he moves to claim the space next to Sylvain, the lingering domestic warmth of Dorothea and Ingrid’s apartment bleeding from his clothes into thin air.

“How are you never cold?” Felix says, not a true discussion, more a way to break the thin layer of ice like a frozen river between then.

Sylvain laughs when he watches Felix again, throws him the same wink he’s thrown earlier. “I think you know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re hot, I get it, very funny.”

“Oh, so you _do _think I’m hot?”

Felix slaps his arm, for good measure. “We’ve already had this discussion, we won’t have it again.”

The smoke that seeps out from Sylvain’s smirk sips in the space, reflects in the mirror of Felix’s eyes, caresses the red of Felix’s lips, and Felix realizes that Sylvain has not touched him yet, not even once, has kept a respectable distance as though they’re two acquaintances having a perfectly normal non-conversation. It gives him whiplash; it’s not as if Felix expected Sylvain to act any differently — if anything, he would have pushed him off never to see him again if Sylvain had tried anything outside the boundaries of friendly — but the very fact that Felix can feel Sylvain’s touch linger in unburied vestiges over every part of him leaves him with a strange kind of yearning to feel it once more, slow strokes brushing dust off the remains of his body, expert tools carving up the truer shape of him.

“Not gonna lie,” Sylvain speaks again through vaporous exhales and silver snow, “it kinda blows my mind that we have so many friends and acquaintances in common. Like— even _Ferdinand_.”

Felix thinks he’s going to follow his train of thought, but Sylvain doesn’t; the cigarette between his fingers consumes itself as he draws a breath, replaces the smoke he blows out with a sip of rum-and-coke, deathless chaser to the deathly burn, and Felix wants to decipher all the different tastes as they unravel from Sylvain’s tongue on his.

“So?” Felix prompts instead.

“I just think it’s funny,” Sylvain says as he crushes the last of the tobacco along the balcony railing, throws the cigarette butt in an ashtray on the garden table. “Dorothea still would have invited you here, Ingrid still would have told me to come for New Year’s Eve. We probably would have met anyway.”

“You mean, without the interview?”

Sylvain’s eyes flare like flaming cocktails when he looks back at Felix, the burn fading as he pushes himself off the railing and settles a shoulder on the wall next to the French windows, waiting for Felix to follow. “That, too. Also without the… you know.”

Felix does know; he considers it now, in the shadows the balcony walls provide, whether Sylvain would still have been into him had they only been photographer and photographed, in that tiny storage office — had they only been friends of friends, meeting for the first time at a New Year’s Eve party none of them would have been obliged to attend. He wonders whether Sylvain would have noticed the way Felix would have looked at him, bordering on recognition from the features and shapes hard-learnt, heart-learnt with too many years of teenage thirst; he wonders whether Sylvain would have watched Felix the way he probably watched Felix during lonely evenings and lonelier nights, the way he’d watched Felix the night before, like Felix had hung the moon and stars across Sylvain’s bedroom ceiling and not merely hung their clothes over his floor. No, Felix’s mind concludes, Sylvain probably wouldn’t have — for who would take one look at Felix as he appears in his daily life, more thorns than roses and still hoping to tear oneself apart over them — but it’s so, so easy to forget when Felix buries his hand in Sylvain’s hair and pulls him down to bite on his lips, when Sylvain pulls Felix against him by the hips and trails warm fingertips over his spine, when Felix pushes Sylvain against the balcony wall for more stolen kisses that make their glasses drop on the floor and spill sticky over the tiles. _Come back with me tonight_, Felix whispers, impulsive and inadvertent, in the secrecy of Sylvain’s mouth on his, _I’m not done with you_, and Sylvain hums against his teeth and his tongue and the crook of his neck.

Ingrid proposes to Dorothea, that night. It’s beautiful, in a way only affirmations of forevers are, a snapped shot of crystallized emotions adorned with falling tears like grain on glossy paper. Surprisingly, no one is nowhere near as shocked as Felix would have thought, considering most of them only knew her as Dorothea’s roommate; perhaps theirs is the kind of feeling and bond that can be seen through the empty space of a lived-in living-room, red strings tangling together until no one can make out beginning nor end, not exactly destiny but no coincidence either. Felix wonders, foolish and a little drunk, if his meeting with Sylvain is the same — a common endeavor of serendipity and inevitability, a piano improvisation for four hands.

“What are you guys, exactly?” Ferdinand asks him later that night, as Sylvain is busy entertaining Dimitri with stories of Claude’s college years, Claude burying himself into the plush cushions of Dorothea’s armchair like he’s trying to disappear from sheer embarrassment.

Felix looks at Sylvain, red and glittery and red, and Sylvain must sense it, because he turns around for the ghost of a smile, soft and promising. Felix sips on his drink. “We’re good, is what we are.”

===

The thing is, Sylvain always leaves.

Sylvain leaves around 6, that New Year morning, after Hilda is stuck driving them to Felix’s house at 3:30 — and Felix feels her stare as she realizes Sylvain climbs down from the car with him, catches a grin like a flash of thunder across her face before she whistles low and slow — Felix barely drifting awake as he hears the scrape of footsteps over creaking parquet and the soft open-and-close of the front door. Sylvain leaves at half-past-two, the first time they see each other again after that day, when he knocks on the door to Felix’s flat after Felix’s latest cam show, unravels him again in the shower before Felix fucks him on the couch, relieving the pent-up tension Felix feels like an electric pulse through his nerves as he draws out moan after shameless moan from Sylvain’s lips, and Sylvain leaves him spent and sleepy with a promise to come back soon. Sylvain leaves at 3:47 the next time he’s the one to come and see Felix, and not the other way around like it had been before Dimitri went back to Grasse, the best surprise Felix has had all day — showing up at his door at precisely 6:30 after a whole day of back-and-forth, teasing texting like an endless game of provocative one-upmanship, opening the door half-naked for the poor man who’s stuck delivering the takeout they ordered online because they both felt too tired to cook, Sylvain forcing them to at least eat on the couch not to get food everywhere on Felix’s bed even though Felix is curled-up and comfortable in the covers he therefore brings to the living-room, kissing Felix good night after they fuck again and Felix almost collapses from exhaustion before he has the time to reply in kind.

Felix tells himself he’s okay with that, with Sylvain slipping away, bewitched by the shadows moonlight extends over the still microcosm of Felix’s flat; theirs is an unspoken, unspecified deal, two half-fixed sums of formerly broken parts enjoying each other’s company and conversation for the moments it lasts. Felix doesn’t think about the restlessness that traverses his limbs and obstructs his mind each time he imagines Sylvain showing up at his place until Sylvain actually does, each time he taps Sylvain’s door code and finds him beaming, always waiting for Felix to take the first step before wrapping his arms around Felix’s waist and pulling Felix right into him.

After all, Felix always leaves, too, too anxious of what he’d find inside of himself if he were to stay.

Yet the thought often crosses his mind, whether Sylvain would spend the night, had he an actual excuse to. Felix can at least admit he’d like him to, if only for the warmth Sylvain infuses into Felix’s too-cold mattress — can at least picture Sylvain telling him he lives too far away and just missed the last subway, that the night bus doesn’t show up until another 63 minutes and he’s too tired; but life has been determined to fuck Felix over in each and every way ever since he turned 13, so it doesn’t work that way, doesn’t let Sylvain pretend he doesn’t live a mere three streets away, doesn’t give Felix the courage or cowardice to ask him, either.

The third time Sylvain shows up unexpected at Felix’s flat, it’s 8 o’clock, and Felix is busy binge-watching a TV show with Dorothea. Dorothea loves it — _it’s so incredibly bad that it becomes good_, she often says — and has insisted, for some enigmatic reason, that Felix watch some episodes with her on the days Ingrid has to stay at work late, if only to be passive witness to the trainwreck that is the plotline and character undevelopment. The main character, a redhead with abs defined enough to compensate for his lack of personality — which automatically makes him inferior to Sylvain, a part of his brain supplies — is busy having nonsensical tongue-kissing with his teacher when there’s a knock on his door. Dorothea’s the one who gets up, weirdly enough; she saunters to the door with an excited smile, and throws herself into the arms of the visitor when she swings the door open a little too strongly and it hits the wall.

There’s buoyancy in Felix’s lungs when he hears Sylvain’s now-familiar huff of laughter.

“I brought wine,” Sylvain merely says as he smiles at Felix when Dorothea explains she’s invited him. “You just can’t watch this show without something to numb the pain.”

“Oh shush.” Dorothea seizes the bottle only to immediately open it and get three plastic cups out; over the years, Felix has acquired a sprawling collection of festival eco cups he keeps out of sheer laziness to bring them back to the stands. “I know you secretly love the show.”

“If by _love _you mean tolerate it out of pure, unadulterated love for _you_, you’re right.” Sylvain settles on the couch next to Felix after he’s hung his coat and scarf on the hanger in the entryway, like he’s now taken to do each time he visits, domestic and mundane like a playlist on repeat and scented candlelight. Ashe meows at him and jumps on his lap, beds into the fabric of his dark jeans in a way that will probably leave fur all over, and Sylvain’s smile is soft as he scratches behind his ears.

“I can’t believe he already adopted you,” Felix says as he slides closer to Sylvain’s side, close enough to pet the cat along with Sylvain’s synchronized movements, and when he raises his gaze Sylvain’s face is mere inches away, so close he deciphers the freckles like copper starlight he can now cartograph by memory alone.

“It’s not my fault,” Sylvain teases, and Felix’s eyes are drawn to that soft, soft smile, the one that leaves dimples like the carved, dark side of a waning gibbous into his cheeks, the one that has Felix yearning to kiss it off until it fades into soughs. “I’m irresistible.”

Felix, like he now so often does, desperately wants to kiss him — but Dorothea hands them the glasses and gracelessly drops into the cushions next to Sylvain and Ashe hisses at her and curls his claws into Sylvain’s thighs and a new episode starts. Sylvain proceeds to spend the entire evening directing sarcastic remarks at all the characters, although they’re fictional and therefore not able to hear any of his complaints, which is as infuriating as it is entertaining, though Felix would die before he decides to let it show; it seems like Sylvain understands, either way, because his expression is proud and satisfied each time he catches Felix laughing at his antics, each time he feels Felix’s sighs of exasperation and concealed fondness vibrate against his side and the underside of his arm where it’s comfortably settled over Felix’s shoulder. Dorothea leaves in the middle of the last episode of the season when she realizes the metros are stopping soon, but not before giving each of them a quick kiss, and soon Felix stares nonplussed at their reflections in the background of the rolling credits.

“That was awful.”

“I know,” Sylvain sighs as he stretches his arms over his head. “But it’s so entertaining!”

“It is,” Felix has to reluctantly agree. “The last episode was almost good compared to what came before.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” and the nickname slides down his spine in shivers, “wait until you reach the third season. It’s_ so bad_. It’s amazing.”

Felix huffs a laugh. He doesn’t know when he’s unconsciously turned to Sylvain, when his fingers have started playing with a stray lock flying up and away from the careful mess of his haircut. “It’s so late you’re not making sense anymore.”

“You’re right.” Sylvain’s voice is barely above a whisper, irises the rich russet of the nighttime city skylight, a brighter imitation of the hue streaming through the linen of Felix’s curtains into the darkened living room. “Maybe I should go to sleep.”

“Yeah.” Felix lets his nails score senseless scars into Sylvain’s nape as he lets himself be drawn into him. “Maybe you should.”

Sylvain smiles into their kiss; it’s slow and scrupulous, Felix meticulously tracing the shape of Sylvain’s lips with his own until he’s taught himself all the ways they fall open for him, until he’s chafed the chap of the pulp onto his, until he feels content just kissing and kissing and kissing again without reserve. Sylvain’s fingers graze at the hem of his shirt, and Felix pulls away, puts agonizing centimeters between them.

“Wait.”

Sylvain’s expression is open and questioning and not unlike that of a kicked puppy. Felix wants to smooth the worried creases of his face with his thumb like it could quieten his own apprehension at what he’s about to say — at Sylvain’s reaction to what he’s about to say.

“I’m… not really in the mood. It’s just— there was Dorothea, and even if I’m... even if I do what I do…” _doesn’t mean I want to have sex all the time_, Felix once again does not say, cannot bring himself to say. “It’s only gonna disappoint you,” he concludes, and almost switches the pronoun to first-person singular.

But Sylvain merely sighs in what sounds like great relief as he lets his forehead drop onto Felix’s shoulder.

“Oh thank _God_,” Sylvain says, his shoulders half-shaking in restrained laughter, “because I’m so, _so _fucking tired right now.”

Felix’s mouth falls open in disbelief when Sylvain raises his head again to look at him, and Felix can parse them, in the night lights, the barely-blue lines drawing quadrants under Sylvain’s eyes. “Wait. So— you’re okay if we don’t fuck?”

“Of course I’m okay with that?” Sylvain speaks as though it’s a stated evidence, a mere fact of life, a proven theory, but his frown soon untangles into another look of concern. “Unless it’s... Me? Like, if you find me ugly, or unsexy, or—”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Felix chides him, shushes the unbidden declaration that threatens to make its way out of his mouth; it sounds a lot like _you’re the most gorgeous person I’ve ever met_ and a little like _I cannot believe someone like you would even want me_. “It’s just… I thought…”

“You thought what?” Sylvain encourages as he closes his arms around Felix’s frame, lets Felix fall against his chest until Felix can hear his heartbeat through the clothes and feels his own pulse keeping time.

“Sylvain, I’m a _sex worker_. I get that it’s not my full-time job, but it’s literally how we’ve met.”

A hum echoes through Sylvain’s chest and into Felix’s ear as Sylvain cards careful fingers into Felix’s hair, loosens the ponytail until it falls apart. “You know, everyone sees me as this… very sexual person. People see me, and look at the way I act around people, and think my goal in life is to fuck everyone I come across.” Felix cannot see him; he doesn’t need to, to hear the truth in his words, to get that Sylvain is sharing a very private part of himself, and so for once he decides to listen. “Maybe I fed into that a little. A lot,” Sylvain corrects with a self-deprecating scoff. “For a long time, people only liked me for my looks and my fortune.”

Felix raises his head at that, stares into Sylvain’s eyes as though staring into the fathoms of Sylvain’s very soul, diving deeper and deeper to reach for the hidden treasures buried into the sand. “There’s no way you could think that’s true.”

“Of course it was,” Sylvain simply replies, and the admission, the way Sylvain states it as an accepted certainty, as a factual resignation, tears at Felix’s heart like an open surgery. “No matter how lovable I made myself, these were the only two things that mattered in the end — how my life path was set out for me, and how good I looked walking it. And I thought that if people loved the expectation they had of me more than they loved myself, I’d try my best to reach these expectations. So I looked for love — or approval, or just understanding — in all the wrong places with all the wrong people while doing all kinds of wrong things, until I could act just as people expected of me… and if that was having sex with tons of people all the time, so be it.”

Felix speaks on impulse, a dam breaking. “I don’t like you just because you look good.”

Sylvain’s mouth closes and opens again, and he looks so stupid and pretty and stupidly pretty that Felix wants to kiss him, until his brain catches with what has just filtered out of his mouth and he fights the blush spilling across his face the way he would fight an enemy soldier on a battlefield, relentless and doomed to fail.

“What?”

Felix huffs in annoyance and in a bid to stop his heart from beating out of his chest. “Yeah, you’re right, a successful college graduate, super-smart art lover, silver-tongued socialite, hot-as-fuck former model is obviously, inherently unlovable. _Idiot_. You’re handsome, but that’s not why I like your company. And before you ask, it’s not because you’re good at sex, or because you’re rich, either.”

Sylvain’s face still carries the shadow of disbelief, but he beams, still, all bright teeth and red lips and dimples, the way people smile at particularly endearing sights and impossibly breathtaking landscapes. “See? It’s the same for you.”

Felix frowns.

“I don’t enjoy your company just because we have sex.” And oh, how unfathomable it is, to Felix’s ears, but after the way he’s just ranted to Sylvain it would be snide of him to mention it, and so he shuts his mouth like the hypocrite he is. “Though I can leave, if it’s bothering you—”

“No,” Felix immediately cuts, clings onto Sylvain’s wrist as he feels the blood pulse there, metronome with the own beat inside his chest, flushing through Sylvain’s veins as it flushes Felix’s face. “We can just… kiss, or whatever.”

Sylvain laughs, the sound making Felix’s bangs fall into his eyes, and Sylvain trails a finger to set them back in place, to tuck a loose lock behind his ear as he leans in. “Or whatever.”

Felix stifles the rest of his sassy remarks with his own mouth.

Sylvain leaves, the morning after, at precisely 9:07.

===

Felix observes the white neon lights drawing starry freckles all over Sylvain’s real ones, crimson crescents of hair and the twin spessartines of his irises the only colors in the monochrome world of the museum.

It had been Sylvain’s idea, somehow, to have a non-failure of a museum non-date as a way to apologize; it probably helps that he’d got the tickets from a former college acquaintance, one of the people in charge of the exhibition. It sounded merely interesting, when Sylvain mentioned it to him, asking if he’d like to go some time around even though no photographs were involved — an exhibition where body became art through movement and _clair-obscur_, where white flashes over dark surfaces ebbed and flowed alongside the motions of the visitors, where people were drawn to reconsider the tangible-yet-immaterial space they occupied through a strange, intimate osmosis with light. Felix had been sceptical, at first, for if flashing flares were the only thing to witness there he feared he’d get bored quite fast, but when Sylvain texted him to say he was free to go now if Felix was as well, Felix had said yes before he’d considered the circumstances.

They no longer fuck every time Sylvain comes to see him or Felix shows up unannounced. It’s strange, though the good kind of strange: sometimes, Sylvain just rings the doorbell and sees Felix’s tired-out face from another 7:30am shooting and decides to cook some chicken curry; sometimes, Felix walks in to Sylvain starting another TV show and dragging Felix on Sylvain’s couch to watch along with him for the rest of the night; sometimes, Sylvain shows up outside the magazine building with a coffee in his hand and twines their fingers together as he walks Felix home. Felix wonders if it could be called dating, though he would have neither the guts nor the modesty to ask — the benefits his former friends granted him never included soft fingers running through his hair or curling around a lock, or sexless nights spent with limbs in innocent tangles and entwined, even breathing, or warm hands closing around his and nails scratching idly at the lifeline braiding across his palm. Most of all, there definitely were not that many unprompted kisses outside the sinful confines of a locked bedroom, never any chaste lips pressing against his temple or his cheek or the corner of his mouth. In any case, whatever this is, it’s incredibly nice, in a way that makes him desperate and longing, the hopeless expectation of an almost-impossible victory chasing bitterness off his tongue.

Perhaps this is why he’s said yes, Felix thinks as he raises the lens of his camera to capture the exact way Sylvain stares at the lights drawing lines and triangles across the webbed gossamer that curls along the ceiling; perhaps he’s merely chasing the feeling that he knows will never come to materialize in his own direction, stuck at the corner of the one-way street of his own emotions like he’s failed a driving test, lost in the headlights of Sylvain’s gaze as a flare traces across his eye and sets it on fire — feeling illiterate as he tries to decode the cyphers in Sylvain’s stare as it turns to him, reading unwritten in sunstone a thousand things never to be engraved into existence.

Perhaps this is why he’s said yes: because he’d been wondering if Sylvain would ask him to do something for Valentine’s Day, and Sylvain had offered to go out even though he clearly did not remember nor care about the date.

“What are you staring at?” Sylvain’s smirk scrawls itself onto the dotted line of the lights across his face.

“Obviously an idiot,” Felix says on reflex, flexed finger over the camera shutter clicking out of mere habit like punctuation.

“A lovely idiot, I hope.”

“Shut up,” Felix answers without bite, shushes the other words that flit through his mind, the same ones that now add themselves like tiny, footnoted numbers as an expansion of his thoughts after each of his sentences to Sylvain. Felix does not acknowledge them, will not acknowledge them, not if Sylvain does not speak them first — which he never will, Felix knows, for surely he does not deserve them. Dorothea had raised a very disbelieving eyebrow when he’d told her about it, asked her whether it happened to anybody else, like the mere symptom of a deep, incurable, potentially deadly heartsickness._ It’s your Aquarius moon Aries mercury_, Dorothea had justified as though Felix was supposed to understand anything about this series of disjointed words. “Let’s go see the rest of the exhibit. The museum closes in an hour.”

Sylvain’s laugh is as light as his footsteps as he saunters down the stairs, Felix right on his heels until they have to remove their shoes to step on the carpeted floor of the exhibition room. Sylvain also removes his coat and scarf, unwinds them from his neck and shoulders before he carelessly leaves them next to a post where neons project onto the same stream of fabric clouding across the room’s ceiling in a physical stream of represented consciousness. There are couples with their children playing on the interactive floor, chasing flickers like fireflies and spinning around carelessly, groups of friends lazing against the walls and enjoying the ambient sounds. Felix watches as he steps into the swarm of glittering dots flying away into lines as he walks, too prideful to try anything else than swaying his camera bag around just yet. Sylvain spins a little, graceful steps drawing circles into the moving lights and raining shooting stars over his skin; the frown on his face tells Felix he’s trying to understand exactly how it works, which device captures his motions for the lights to flee and flow. _I wanna see if it works with both of us_, Sylvain says, more serious than Felix has ever seen him, and they’re soon running across the floor like they’re decades younger as they observe the sea of flickering fragments fly apart in their wake. Felix tries jumping in, takes a running start from the opposite wall before flying in the middle of a still puddle of fake stars, watches them scatter like raindrops when he lands and spark glowing reflections over Sylvain’s face as he films Felix, laughing all the while.

Sylvain takes Felix’s hand, as gentle as it’s sudden, pulls him back against the currents, makes him spin around in an impromptu dance; Felix’s hands find Sylvain’s shoulders, and he looks around, sees the lights spinning away into a whirlwind of distant asteroids as they sway, melts into the warmth of Sylvain’s hands on his waist — when he looks up, Sylvain’s eyes burn like illegible stars, unmapped as they carve holes into every wall Felix has ever held up.

Felix wants to kiss him, so he doesn’t, and gently pulls away and takes Sylvain’s hand to walk through the rest of the exhibition.

They analyze and scan every bit of the rooms, from the screen that projects their distorted picture in slow-motion spirals and waves, to the letters raining across the cube of fabric they step into and try and interact with for ten minutes, to the touch screen where Felix draws squares and triangles and where Sylvain draws hearts and penises until two toddlers put their innocent hands all over the little dots of light there and Sylvain fades away in half-shame. It makes Felix laugh in soft expirations, something he tries to ignore when Sylvain turns to him with a satisfied grin, and he hides behind another screen where a flurry of birdlike flares follow his frame.

“There’s one last room,” Sylvain says as he points at a big, fireproof door from which people are walking in and out, and Felix follows him as they step into what seems to be a soundproof room.

It’s pitch black as they enter, and Felix is disorientated, fears he’s going to walk on someone sitting there, until a wave of animated, white static thunders across the walls and turns everything lightning-grey for a couple of seconds, long enough for Sylvain to designate an empty spot near a corner. People are lying on the floor like under a starless sky, or seated in the way one seats on the grass in the summer while waiting for the fireworks show to start, or propped up against the walls; Sylvain lays his coat and scarf in a makeshift pillow as he lies down, his hand inviting as it taps the space at his side for Felix to occupy. The lights ripple in waves along the ambient music and the wordless whispers of a disembodied voice, squares of light drawing sound patterns around them, and Felix lies down to follow their curl with his gaze; the bass echoes through the empty room of his body, his bones buzzing with the foreign feeling of peace and thoughtlessness, and soon the space around him reduces to the wave like moonglow and Sylvain’s warmth at his side. The sparkle of windchimes reflect off Sylvain’s face as Felix watches him, the beat like a distant pace when Sylvain turns his face to him — Sylvain’s knuckles ghost along Felix’s face, draw him in like the currents along the walls, like the false fireflies fluttering around them, the music beating to the rhythm of Felix’s heart, soundwaves pulsing through his chest and across Sylvain’s skin in white light that Felix traces with his eyes; the pulse thunders through his ribs and shakes his core when Sylvain’s lips find his, the kiss slow and tentative and opposite to the electrical storm kicking through Felix’s soul.

Felix threads his fingers through Sylvain’s when Sylvain’s hands brush into his hair; he’s instinctively closed his eyes, all other sensations perfectly magnified in the absence of light along the tempo of the music, from Sylvain’s breath soft on his skin to Sylvain’s taste upon his lips to the cadence of the blood rushing through his veins. When they break apart, and Felix’s eyes open again, and the lights shower starstreams across the fondest expression Felix has ever seen on Sylvain, he, too, almost breaks like the soundwaves on the shore of his ribcage, and once again, words he did not imagine he would ever think strangle his breath.

“Dinner at your place?” Sylvain whispers once the lights dim and the music fades.

Felix doesn’t answer, and kisses him again, and regrets kissing him again when Sylvain takes it as an invitation to kiss him all evening long — in the subway when they go home, in the kitchen when they cook, on the couch when they watch Felix’s favorite movie, in Felix’s bed as a synonym for _good night_.

The bed is warm and weighted beside Felix when he wakes, so different from all the nights he’s ever spent, a thermal reminder of the newfound dis-solitude coloring the weather map of his everydays. The sleep-stained daze he drifts out from leaves him lazy and comfortable, willfully ignorant of the way the mattress slants underneath his edges when the weight recedes and the sheets are suddenly too big for his sole frame; Sylvain is leaving, the small, most awake side of his brain supplies in the haze, Sylvain is leaving like he’s so predisposed and like Felix had started getting unaccustomed to, so Felix swallows the bittersweet, morning pill of discontent as he curls into the spacious solace of Sylvain’s residual incandescence. Sylvain’s pillow muffles the sounds of doors opening and closing when Felix ensconces his face there, deep, slumbersome breaths infusing Sylvain’s scent into his lungs like percolating teawater. Felix almost dozes back into dormancy right there, in the make-belief of Sylvain’s shape next to him, until he hears the bedroom door open again and Sylvain’s body crawling back into place shakes the sleep out of him, and Felix turns back around in an embarrassed pile of curled-up limbs under the covers.

It’s still surprising, when Sylvain stays, though it’s been happening more often recently; it’s especially surprising today since there is no reason for him to stay, no reason to get back into Felix’s bed as naked or clothed as he’d been the night before, no reason to twine his legs in-between Felix’s and slot his chest along Felix’s back like a perfect puzzle piece. As to Felix himself, somnolence can be the only explanation, Felix thinks, why his ever-cold being, keeping himself from every living thing at snow-lined distance, would let himself thaw into Sylvain this way, would allow Sylvain’s hand to curl low across his waist and pull him in like he does now. Felix refuses to think it may be because of the way Sylvain kisses the dip between his shoulder blades like he’s punctuating poetry, the way his fingers brush Felix’s hair away from his nape to graze his lips to the back of Felix’s neck, the way Sylvain’s hand searches for Felix’s to lace their fingers loose.

Felix definitely refuses to think of the way his own heart tightens painfully and soars out from beneath his ribs when he imagines Sylvain feeling the exact same things.

“Morning,” Sylvain whispers along Felix’s collarbone and draws the word along Felix’s stomach in lazy handwriting, the sweetest greeting he’s ever said until the next time Felix gets to hear it again. Felix pushes back against Sylvain’s body, trying to get rid of the cold February air between them, yearning for warmth and an absolute lack of space, Sylvain’s fingers still trying to reach for his through the sightlessness of the sheets, and when Sylvain’s hand accidentally grazes against Felix’s boxers Felix wonders if Sylvain can feel Felix’s sigh echoing in shivers against his skin.

Sylvain whispers an apology as though his touch could be anything less than desired, but Felix has never been good with words; he settles for stretching his shape against Sylvain, his head finding the crook of Sylvain’s shoulder as though a simple fluke, his lips brushing against the side of Sylvain’s jaw as he mouths _good _and _morning _and _Sylvain _in three downward steps along the scrub of scarlet shadow there, and the way Sylvain’s fingers brush down his thighs this time is more purposeful, more suggestive. Sylvain is always so gentle with him, Felix wonders, _too _gentle, as though Felix is the one who could vanish at the slightest wrong word or touch and not Sylvain himself, as though Sylvain would always come back into Felix’s space like this very morning even through Felix’s bad days and worse evenings and worst nights. Sylvain’s hand keeps smoothing sleep out of Felix’s legs and side and chest, keeps making Felix press closer against him like there's still some unclaimed, untouched centimeter of room between them, keeps touching everywhere but the place where Felix aches most. Felix has never been one to play games, too impatient to be clever and too rash to be wise, so he reaches for Sylvain’s hand and wraps his lips around the tip of Sylvain’s ring finger.

In that very moment, there’s no stronger delight than the feeling of Sylvain hardening instantly against his ass as Felix sucks on his fingers, reaches low around the knuckles, licks at the gap between the middle and ring.

Sylvain swears against Felix’s neck as he bites into the skin there, and Felix sighs around the weight of Sylvain’s fingertips — Felix wonders if Sylvain is finally going to fuck him properly, if he’s finally going to see Felix for what he truly is and shatter the cheap glass of his bones; but Sylvain just thrusts against him in lazy ebb-and-flows, his cock hard under the layer of fabric keeping it away from Felix’s skin in the most pleasant, punishing burn.

“What do you want, love?” Sylvain asks right along the edge of Felix’s ear where he’s nipped at it, wet fingers trailing currents down to Felix’s hipbones, and Felix sighs in approval when Sylvain’s hand finally touches along his dick, twirls into the hair at the base, pulls it out of his underwear to stroke at the tip, slow and excruciating.

_You_, Felix wants to answer, _just like this,_ _everywhere and all the time and for as long as you’ll have me_, and the dangerous admission almost slips out of his mouth, almost takes the shape of breaths he would not be able to take back.

“What do _you _want?” Felix replies instead, his own hand searching and urgent as he reaches behind his back to uncover Sylvain’s cock, curling his fist around the shaft until the piercings there bury marks into his palms and Sylvain can thrust there too, Felix’s fingers slick and sticky with the precum that beads at the head. Sylvain’s breathy laughter turns into a rough hum that Felix feels in vibrations through his spine, Sylvain’s hand fisting his dick a little faster, a little harder, in the perfect way Felix likes, the tip of his thumb flicking at the frenulum, and Felix wonders how many times Sylvain has watched him do this to himself if he can replicate it so well.

“There’s a lot of things I want, _Fe_,” Sylvain’s teeth tease across the line of his throat, the nickname fitting through the very real gaps in Felix’s metaphorical armor like the tip of a serrated blade; it makes Felix gasp around a mouthful of air, a last breath before the fall.

“Tell me,” Felix demands, and Sylvain, oh-so-kind Sylvain, complies.

“I want to be inside you, _right now_,” Sylvain sings in the most thrilling prose, his hand so, so perfect as it works covetous around Felix. “I bet you’d feel so good. Oh, you’d feel so tight and warm around me. You haven’t been fucked in a while, right?” There’s a noise that sounds like a moan ripping from Sylvain’s chest when Felix twists his wrist just right, just how he’s learned to touch Sylvain along the month and a half they’ve seen each other — it’s not dating, Felix’s mind insists, people never _date _Felix; yet, the word finds some unclaimed space in his brain, one suspiciously close to his thoughts and feelings for Sylvain — _There’s been no one else since then, right_, he can imagine Sylvain asking as he feathers kisses upon the marks he’s bitten into Felix’s shoulders, and Felix answers the words he’s surely dreamt up in a chorus of _yes, yes, yes_.

Sylvain’s hand catches flawless around Felix’s tip, and Sylvain is so hard in his hand as he whispers filthy nothings into Felix’s ear; _you’d look so good, Fe_, Sylvain says, rough-edged and low-pitched in the exact way that drives Felix insane when Felix fucks him,_ full of my cock, filled with my cum, dripping out from your hole when I’m done with you_, and Felix shushes his own moan against Sylvain’s lips as he comes all over Sylvain’s hand. Sylvain’s dick throbs under his fingers and Felix feels wetness and warmth against the cotton of his boxers, and he’s the one who turns to kiss Sylvain, to coax him out of his high into the lazy low of late-morning idleness.

“We should clean up the sheets,” Sylvain laughs against Felix’s temple when Felix curls his arm around his middle; _later_, he answers, _later_, before satisfied sleep claims him yet again.

===

His birthday party is supposed to be a surprise, except Annette is anything but discreet, and that makes it all the better. Felix hates surprises — at the very least, Felix hates surprises that do not involve Sylvain randomly showing up at his place. She brings him along to go shopping at 5:30 even though it’s a Saturday and all the shops are crowded and Felix knows damn well Annette hates going shopping when it’s crowded and Annette knows damn well Felix hates shopping full stop; she makes him take smartphone pictures of every outfit and piece of lingerie she tries on and sends them all to Mercedes, as though her girlfriend is never going to see them in any other context than on a badly-calibrated display screen; she makes him wait in line for close to thirty minutes because she’s suddenly craving the new, sweet Nutella bun that’s on all the McDonald’s posters like it’s the most delicious, freshly-baked pastry and not a defrosted abomination that never should have seen the light of day, only to be immensely disappointed when the bun is served half-frozen still and the chocolate inside is more like a piece of solid, mud-colored, sugary death.

“Let’s go home,” Annette says with the dejection one only shows after a sudden, devastating breakup, and Felix ruffles her hair when she slides her arm in the crook of his elbow to let herself be guided to the subway.

“Yours or mine?”

“Yours,” Annette immediately replies, and the probability Felix had been contemplating mutates into certainty. “There are escalators,” she tries to justify, but it’s half-hearted, and Felix chooses to let it go.

The ambient noises of idle conversation and distant laughter echo through the staircase as they climb up Felix’s building, and Annette barely has time to stop in her tracks and whisper _oh fuck_ before Felix slides the key in his lock and pushes the door open.

A dozen pair of eyes all turn to focus on him as a hush of mild panic sweeps across the living-room.

“Annie,” Ashe says, his green eyes sharp through their usual kindness when he glances at her, “did you forget to send the text?”

“I’m so sorry!” Annette whines as she walks up to bury her face in Mercedes’ chest, the last, elongated syllable dissolving in the comfortable crux of her bosom.

Ashe sighs in the way he’s learnt to sigh through years of Annette Antics, a little annoyed, a little adoring. “Well. Happy birthday, Felix, I guess?”

A common shout of an awkward-but-well-meaning birthday greeting, from which Sylvain’s voice stands out in its fonder-ness, and Felix’s gaze gravitates to where he’s sat on the armrest of the couch next to Bernadetta. His smile is the exact same shape it had taken when they first met, Felix notices, smitten-dimpled and stunned-crooked, and Felix laughs that mirthful, unrefined, gross laughter he hates so much. He does not find it in himself to care.

Someone starts up the music again and he finds himself greeting his friends: Dedue has brought three full tubs of homemade hummus that everyone but him is probably going to eat, with the way he is; Lysithea glares daggers at Felix from where she’s sat in her boyfriend Cyril’s lap, even as the cake she’s made for him sits triumphant and beautiful on the coffee table, and he tugs on her hair like one would tease a little sister when she talks with Annette about their shared college courses just to hear her threaten to stab him where he stands; Dorothea and Ingrid are chatting with Sylvain and Mercedes, who surprisingly seems to get along _splendidly _with him, if the way she pats her arm as Ingrid relates tales of their childhood is any indication. Bernadetta is holding — yes, Felix has not dreamt that up, this is definitely the hand of Dimitri’s step-sister, but that’s a problem for Later Felix, Felix decides after he nods hello and goes on to greet Ignatz and Raphael sitting next to them. These three have always been his favorite coworkers, some of the only ones to treat him as though he’s truly part of the magazine, and not just another freelance photographer struggling to make ends meet even as the top editors in the company make six-digit wages a year — perhaps it’s because Ignatz is also part of the creative team, as the magazine’s graphic designer, and Raphael’s outsider status as one of the only sports reporters in the building makes them find some uncanny commonalities, and Bernadetta is… well, Bernadetta. Leonie, a friend he made in boxing class, arrives at the very same time Dimitri does — and that’s another surprise in itself, that Dimitri has taken the time to come back to the city so soon after leaving, even for Felix’s birthday. Claude stands between them, chatting with Leonie but firmly holding Dimitri’s hand, and Felix cannot exactly believe that the emotional mess of his childhood friend has managed to get it together before Felix himself did, so he hugs him out of spite and out of gratefulness and a little out of a way to prevent him from seeing Edelgard too soon and turning the fuck back to flee again.

Claude seems to be way more people-aware than Felix gave him credit for, because he immediately sees the way Dimitri and Edelgard shut up and shut down as they stare at each other, and smoothly walks up to kiss her hand and introduce himself as Dimitri’s boyfriend — and the brief thought of Sylvain speaking these words, of Sylvain referring to himself as_ Felix’s boyfriend_ makes his stomach twist and his breath shorten in heat and embarrassment and a hint of desire — before swiftly leaving them to talk it out as he goes to greet Sylvain.

Sylvain, who looks all the words on the spectrum of radiance and like he’s always belonged there, in the same place he’s standing, in Felix’s kitchen corner surrounded by Felix’s friends as he glances at Felix from the corner of his gold, gold, gold eyes. Felix goes to fill himself a drink.

“You can relax, you know.” There’s a glint of too-keen discernment in the erin of Ashe’s eyes that turns them celadon, the one that Felix has been taught means trouble.

“How did you even get into my flat without keys?”

“Oh, you know.” Felix doesn’t know, isn’t sure he ever wants to know. “But that’s not what you’re worrying yourself sick over, is it?”

Felix cracks his beer bottle open. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, which is as loud an admission as any, really.

“You haven’t said a single word to him yet, have you noticed?”

“So? It’s not like we’re… close.”

Ashe scoffs the kind of aporetic scoff Felix tolerates in no one else’s mouth but his, because Felix knows Ashe doesn’t truly mean to make fun of him. Maybe. “You guys have been dating—”

“It’s _not _dating.”

“Sure, and I’m not dating Dedue.” The engagement ring on Ashe’s finger flashes accusingly in the low living-room lights. “But let’s run with it. You’ve been _seeing each other_ for close to two months now, but no one knows because you won’t say it. In all honesty, Felix, most of the people here thought he was just another random guy who wanted to hook up with you.”

Felix frowns. “Annette wouldn’t invite someone like that to my birthday party.”

“Exactly,” Ashe smiles, innocent and victorious and everything Felix despises and adores. “Besides, everyone can see how… taken he is with you.” Ashe is careful in his choice of words, something Felix is grateful for. “If you must know, he was one of the first people here, and we couldn’t stop teasing him for a whole hour. It was adorable,” he coos, sweet and angelic like he’s not the most devious person Felix has ever met, though from the stories Sylvain told him about Claude the title will soon be up for grabs again. “Felix,” Ashe says again, soft like an incantation, “all we want is for you to get the happiness you deserve. And I will physically fight that stupid brain of yours that keeps telling you you don’t deserve it.”

“You can’t physically fight my brain. That’s _literally _impossible.”

“I despise you,” Ashe sighs with all the love he’s able to muster, before he hands Felix another beer bottle. “Would you look at that, Sylvain is drink-less and full of charm, and you’re charm-less and full of drinks. What a perfect match.” He flees into Dedue’s huge, protective arms before Felix has the time to hit him over the head for the insult, tongue pulled at Felix like he’s nine years old, so Felix has no choice but to swallow his pride and make his way to where Sylvain’s standing, still chatting with Mercedes and Claude and scratching the head of the Other Ashe where the cat is perched on the small kitchen counter.

“Here,” Felix says as he pushes the bottle into Sylvain’s hands, ignores the way his breath heaves in the vines of his lungs when their fingers brush.

“Hey, Fe.” Felix doesn’t think he’ll ever get sick of it — of the now-familiar nickname Sylvain normally uses only when they’re alone and the way it tumbles off his tongue, of the garnet glimmer in his eyes as he looks into Felix’s own and Felix catches his own reflection, of the pull of his kiss-bitten lips along the vowel that makes him break into the specter of a smile. “Happy birthday.”

Felix clinks their bottles together in clandestine counterfeit of Sylvain’s lips on his.

Even Glenn shows up, later, to Felix’s astonishment, hand-in-hand with Holst like they’re still young lovers and not two years into their marriage. His brother must see Sylvain’s hand playing with the hem of Felix’s sweater as Felix completely ignores Glenn when he walks in, because he makes a beeline to them and tears Felix away from the comfort of Sylvain’s almost-touch to hug him close and ruffle his hair — _so, a redhead, huh_, he whispers in Felix's ear when he hugs him, and Felix elbows him right in the stomach. Glenn's gaze stabs into Sylvain from his fifteen-centimeter-shorter standpoint behind Felix, evidently about to tear into him, until Holst lets out the happiest exclamation and hugs Sylvain like a favorite cousin one only sees once a year for the holidays. _He’s one of Hilda’s best friends_, Holst explains to Glenn, and Glenn looks downright murderous before Felix drags Dimitri aside for a summary of his hour-long talk with Edelgard, only to come back to Glenn’s arm thrown around Sylvain’s shoulder as they drink matching beers and laugh matching laughs when Sylvain drunkenly eats hummus by the spoonful.

“I _love _this guy,” Glenn says to Felix as soon as he spots him, and Felix is suddenly grateful his older brother has now settled down, because he’s not sure he would have handled seeing Glenn acting with Sylvain the way he acted some years ago, hitting on everyone he could get his hands on.

_So do I_, Felix refrains from retorting out of spite as he takes Sylvain’s hand for a dance in the middle of the room alongside Annette and Ashe and the rest of his more rowdy friends, but before his brain has the time to catch up with what he’s just thought he feels Sylvain’s hands on his hips and Sylvain’s forehead on his and Sylvain’s breath on his lips.

His arms reach up to cross behind Sylvain’s neck in the pure instinct only drunkenness brings out in him, and he lets the sound of music and the off-key singing of his friends lull him into Sylvain’s embrace and rhythm, whispers the words he knows and hums the lyrics he doesn’t; Sylvain stares at him, only at him, when Felix opens his eyes again, through carmine lashes and burnt umber gaze and the flare of feeling coursing through Felix, red as lust, red as—

“I want to tell you something later,” Sylvain susurrates in the secretive centimeters separating them, and Felix wonders if he can feel Felix’s heartbeat stammering against his chest, wonders if Sylvain is gonna tell him what Felix dies a little more to tell like it would break the curse of the ever-repeating days they spend in that undiscussed, undisclosed relationship, wonders _me too_ but merely says _okay, okay_ before Sylvain steals a kiss, and another, and another.

It’s when Felix surfaces around 4am to a too-cold bed that he remembers Sylvain had said he’d stay the night, and something shatters to smithereens insite his chest.

He doesn’t truly believe it, at first, too used to Sylvain’s presence that he’s been lulled into complacency, that he’s taken for granted the fact that Sylvain would be here when he woke up; his fingers caress the empty space where Sylvain had fallen asleep to Felix’s hands in his hair mere hours before, and the lack of residual warmth tells him everything he needs to know, confirms each and every fear he’s had for months.

He should be happy, that it ends this way, not with a bang of doors and spiteful insults, but with a whispered good night and one last, tender kiss. It’s more than Felix deserves, these two months of peace and hopeful happiness, these two months of pretending Felix wasn’t the most boring, aggravating person to ever exist, these two months of imagining Felix could somehow be worthy of appreciation and care —_ and love_, his mind whispers, and he censors the word as soon as he thinks it. Sylvain’s just another person Felix offended without meaning to, another almost-lover he bored into leaving, another existence he slighted in a way he probably will never be aware of, because why else would Sylvain have left, if it wasn’t the case? Why else would Felix end up, once again, so very much alone?

His cat stretches where he’s curled up at the edge of the mattress when Felix throws his legs over the covers and half-stumbles out of bed, makes his dazed way to the kitchen where he fills a glass of water to choke back the emptiness threatening to choke him out, observes the closed bathroom door—

Felix never closes the bathroom door, he realizes, a miracle in itself, for the sole reason that it’s where Ashe’s litter box is.

His feet bring him there in three small steps, and he knocks on the door, soft as the whisper of Sylvain’s name that seeps out of his lips. There’s no answer, so he knocks again, leaves Sylvain’s name hanging in the air like a question, before his hand seizes the knob and he turns it open.

Sylvain is half-collapsed against the tiled wall next to the toilet, the very picture of wasted disgrace, the only sight Felix ever wished to see. Felix says nothing, only kneels down in compassion and so much relief, pushes Sylvain’s sweaty bangs out of his forehead, watches the pushed-up contrast of freckles where the obvious sickness has left his skin pale.

“I’m so sorry,” is the only thing Sylvain says as he looks back, eyes glazed over in an overly-sweet cake.

“You don’t have to be sorry for being sick, you know. The hummus, however…”

Sylvain snorts, dimples defining his jaw like Felix’s nails where they bury into the flesh when they lie together, his bare chest stuttering up against the sound. Felix hands him the glass, and Sylvain chugs it down, water dripping along the corner of his mouth onto the slants of his torso in a way that makes Felix bite his lip. “Still. I always fuck everything up. Even when I wanted to tell you _something—_”

Felix scratches his scalp in encouragement, in anticipation. “You can still say what you wanted to say, you know.”

“_No_,” Sylvain states, definite and painful. “It’s definitely _not _a great time.”

“I thought you were gone.” It slips out from Felix’s mouth, foolish and fallen, leaves him vulnerable in a different yet similar way to Sylvain’s own exposure — but Sylvain’s eyes just snap to his, nescient and bewildered.

“Why would I go anywhere else?”

Something breaks inside him again, like everything inside Felix has been broken and merged back into a more perfect shape along each of Sylvain’s words and motions and essence, and Felix almost tells him.

“Come back to bed,” Felix tells him instead, “come back to me,” and Sylvain lets himself be pulled by Felix’s hand and falls into Felix’s embrace.

===

“So. I got a birthday gift.”

A chorus of _oohs _and _aahs _and clattering coins floods the chat box as Felix strokes himself lazily, looks at the toy out of frame on the side of his bed, remembers garneted lust in Sylvain’s stare as he’d offered it to Felix — _it’s remote-controlled_, Sylvain had just said, and the words had sent a thrill of thunder across Felix’s bones, _use it next time_. Felix works a practiced knuckle in and out his rim, teasing himself as much as he teases the people behind their computers, as much as he teases Sylvain, he hopes; Felix wonders if Sylvain is already touching himself, on the other side of the screen, is already working himself off as he imagines teasing Felix’s ass open with only the tip of his cock in perfect rhythm with Felix’s finger, or if he’s holding back from even grazing the skin of his dick, precum leaking over the shaft without any way to relieve the urge to thrust. It’s something they haven’t yet done; Sylvain always lets himself be fucked, for some reason, probably because he enjoys it, for one, and is also too considerate of Felix doing it plenty already for his cam show, always spreading Felix open with his tongue when he sucks him off but not more than that, never more than that, letting Felix stretch him wide and assuage Felix’s want and need with the hot humidity of his tongue, or the fast drag of his fingers, or the tight warmth of his hole.

His hands leave him open and needy as they reach for the vibrator, bringing it into view. “I asked _someone _to play with me a little,” Felix says as though it hadn’t been Sylvain’s entire idea. He strokes the pristine white silicon of the vibrator — it’s elegant, in the way not a lot of dildos are, with a black tactile base Felix uses to turn it on, and a small light blinks red when the toy properly connects to his phone and, presumably, Sylvain’s. “It has a remote control, so you dirty fucks will play nice and look on as one of you has the _privilege _of doing everything he wants with me.” Felix, although he’d never admit it, is extremely turned-on at the idea; he’s always been a specialist of keeping perfect control over every aspect of his life, and not being able to know what Sylvain means to try, concealed in his flat a few streets away, leaves him both anxious and aroused. He hopes the words he spits to the camera lens reach him, somehow, connect with his body like a lightning bolt until he cannot bear to be away from Felix any longer.

Felix spreads lube over the toy and feels it vibrate, a little, just one single pulse that tells him it’s working, and he uses the vibration to drag the tip along the head of his cock down the length, nudges it against his hole, and finally, finally, pushes it in.

The toy immediately starts to vibrate, and Felix sighs, the pleasure coursing through him in vaporous flumes of invisible breaths. The vibrator moves in and out, ever-so-slow as Felix’s fingers guide it in, shivers inside him in a delightful buzz until Felix can fit the whole length in his hole, the slightly-curved tip brushing against his prostate with every steady tremor. The toy is smaller than Sylvain’s cock, he thinks as he drags it in and out punishingly slow, and Felix wonders how Sylvain would fit inside him, if Felix would adapt himself to the size and length until it perfectly matches its shape, until Felix can believe the absurd theory that Sylvain belongs right there, in him, with him. He clenches around the toy, and a wave of powerful vibrations surges through him and coaxes a whine out of him, and if Felix concentrates he can almost feel the toy throbbing as though Sylvain himself is fucking him, as though he’s thrusting deeper and faster inside to the rhythm of Felix’s moans. A string of insults and pleas to unknown gods fall from Felix’s tongue as his other hand instinctively strokes the length of his own dick, precum coating his fingers as he spreads it over the skin, his gaze catching his filthy, awful reflection into the camera viewfinder until he closes them again and pictures Sylvain again.

_Fuck, fuck, Syl—_ the name trembles out almost in reflex, almost in prayer, and the toy suddenly shuts down.

“What the fuck.” He reaches for the base of the toy, tries to see if it turned off accidentally, but the red light is still blinking when he pulls the vibrator out of him. The viewers are debating about the toy, about the apparently bad battery life or the awful bluetooth connection, though Felix has a hard time believing Sylvain would buy him something so cheaply-designed. “Is the battery that bad?” He asks no one in particular, and the answers are ambivalent as they trickle in amongst continuous demands to keep on, to go for another vibrator. Half-heartedly, he reaches into his drawer for one of his most trusted toys, another vibe that he’s used for years, and reaches back to his task as he turns it on.

The new toy does not work as well as the other one, for some reason; Felix thinks the pleasure came more from the idea of Sylvain controlling it, of the picture he painted in his mind of Sylvain’s red hair falling like worn-out threads over his eyes as he thumbed at a remote with one hand and curled fingers around himself with another, of red lips rent russet as the edge of teeth nipped at the plush, of exhales shaking out of him with the alacrity of mistral. The image of Sylvain watching as he opens himself up does more for him than the vibrator, and he presses the toy harder inside him, imperfect replacement for Sylvain’s cock, thinks of Sylvain bringing himself to the edge mere streets away, bites his fist to prevent Sylvain’s name from slipping out his lips like it’s so prone to doing now—

There’s a knock at his door, a desperate, echoing rasp of knuckles.

“What the hell,” Felix groans as the chat tells him to ignore it, to go on and fuck himself harder, and Felix almost complies, lets the ring of virtual coins wash over him — his phone rings, on the side of his bed, and damn his common sense taking over the wanton haze in his brain when he angrily pulls the toy out of him and grabs his phone.

_Open up_, the text says, and a delicious shiver crawls up Felix’s spine when he sees the name of the sender.

Felix throws a satin bathrobe over his frame as he half-rushes into the main room and unlocks the front door.

“Sylv—”, he starts, but the sound of Sylvain’s name is lost in Sylvain’s lips against his, Sylvain coaxing his mouth open with the soft silk of his tongue. Felix instinctively runs fingers along Sylvain’s broad shoulders, sharpens his nails into Sylvain’s scalp when his hands burn winter-cold along Felix’s naked skin beneath the cloth, and when Sylvain presses against him Felix can feel how hard he is under the rough fabric of denim against Felix’s hip.

“I couldn’t stand it anymore,” Sylvain says as they part and his mouth drifts to press featherlight into the space below Felix’s ear, “I had to come and fuck you myself.”

_Do it_, Felix whispers, _do it now_ — he could probably die content with Sylvain fucking him into the yielding cushions of the couch until they remember their shape, or Sylvain pinning him against a wall as he cages Sylvain’s hips between his legs, or Sylvain bending him over the desk against his living-room window for all the neighbors to see; but Sylvain’s fingers slip between his own as he raises Felix’s hand to his lips and leaves chaste kisses on each inch of skin he can find there, and all of Felix’s emotions melt down into a single one that probably won’t ever leave his mouth and will burn his heart to ashes.

Sylvain pulls him along through the living room and into Felix’s bedroom, draws him against his chest when they cross the threshold and kisses him as though he expects only a long, slow dance and not a fast little death. They’re out of frame for now, Felix knows, but the sounds of sighs and soft kisses are probably loud enough for everyone to hear; he does not find it in himself to care, not when satin slips away into a silken puddle at his feet when Sylvain caresses his shoulders, not when his fingers carefully undo Sylvain’s coat and shirt until Sylvain’s left in nothing but his jeans, not when Sylvain lets himself be pushed onto his too-hard mattress and his hands find their rightful place on Felix’s ass when Felix straddles him. There’s a hint of darkness in Sylvain’s eyes as they roam over Felix’s frame, the umber of winter days and the taste of coffee on his tongue that Felix melts into like a sugar cube when they kiss again, the plum of the mark Sylvain leaves on the side of Felix’s neck when Felix catches him staring right into the camera, the obsidian of the glint in his smirk when Felix watches their digitized reflection in the screen of his computer.

“Sorry, boys,” Sylvain says like he’s not sorry at all, and Felix _loves _it, lives for it, that edge of possessiveness in Sylvain’s voice as though Felix is something worth keeping, “his _boyfriend_’s gonna borrow him for a while.”

Felix’s laptop shuts close under Sylvain’s hand as Felix kicks the toys off the bed, his foot just short of actually hitting the computer as well; Sylvain has the audacity of looking affronted at this, but Felix wipes the expression off his pretty face with a few well-aimed grinds of his cock against his thigh, his fingers reaching Sylvain’s wrists to guide his hands back onto him. They’ve warmed over, but not enough, and Sylvain traces ice and winter in light snowfall with his fingertips, his nails biting frosted pathways over Felix’s thighs until the cold settles over his hips and in the space just below his ribs as Felix undoes the belt and buttons of Sylvain’s pants and pulls them down. _Want your cock_, Felix’s voice strangles in half a groan when he removes Sylvain’s jeans and his underwear goes with it, _want you to fill me up_, and Felix does not think he will ever tire of the way Sylvain’s dick jumps at his words, not before Sylvain tires of him and eventually finds someone nicer and prettier and softer to fuck, not before Sylvain finishes what he’s begun and breaks Felix’s heart for good.

“I take it you liked my gift?” The edge of Sylvain’s smirk is sharp enough to bury itself into Felix’s throat and slice it clean and open. Felix wouldn’t dream of a better way to go.

“It has a shitty battery.”

“Not the battery, love,” Sylvain says after a long, thorough kiss, one that makes goosebumps prickle up Felix’s back and makes his toes curl into the sheets, one that speaks a hundred synonyms for lust. “I turned it off. It has another part, you see. A connected one, that I used on myself. I could feel _everything_,” he goes on as his hips flow in slow waves against Felix’s, their cocks grinding together until Felix feels his precum drip along Sylvain’s length. “Like I was _deep _inside you. Like I fucked you myself.”

“So what, that wasn’t enough?” Felix sneers, an empty provocation, a pretense of protection. “Truly insatiable.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” Sylvain whispers against his mouth as he puts his forehead against Felix’s, and Felix thinks he’s misheard. There are fingers linking with his, a hand bringing his own to Sylvain’s lips, and Felix belatedly realizes from the dust of freckles that it is Sylvain’s hand; Sylvain trails the edge of his teeth across each of Felix’s fingers, traces the shape of the scars with his mouth and his tongue. “It wasn’t you. It didn’t have your hands. It didn’t have your face. It didn’t have your eyes. All the things I want— it didn’t have any of them.” Sylvain’s gaze on him is a loose arrow blazing copper right through Felix’s ribcage, a pain so swift and sharp that it almost feels like a remembrance, like a long-past death, and Felix knows no better way of sealing away Sylvain’s words than to keep them buried inside his own mouth. _You’re so loose for me_, Sylvain laughs in appreciation when he sinks a finger inside Felix,_ so wet and open_, and as long and thick as Sylvain’s fingers are, they’re not enough, Felix thinks as Sylvain fucks into him the exact way Felix likes, as though he’s spent evenings after evenings poring over the texts and subtexts of Felix’s holy nights, as though he can decipher how to move from the exact tone Felix chants his name in.

“Sylvain, fuck me,” Felix orders when he reaches for the lube and slicks up Sylvain’s cock, and relishes the fact that he can finally see Sylvain’s expression as he bites his lip to half-blood, the way he tends to do when Felix touches him.

“How, angel?”

The nickname tickles along his every limb until it settles low in his gut and yearned-for in his chest. “I don’t care. However you want me.”

Sylvain warms the air between them with a hum, and lays a chaste, cooling kiss on Felix’s lips. “I wanna see you when you impale yourself on my cock.”

It’s Sylvain’s voice, that does it for him, it must be, because no one else has ever managed to make Felix like sex where he wasn’t the one to call the shots somehow, because no other words than those carelessly slipping out of Sylvain’s mouth along the months have ever made Felix feel this beautiful, this _wanted_. Felix kisses him again, and Sylvain’s dick is slick between his legs and against the cleft of his ass when Felix pushes himself off, Sylvain’s lustful gaze spearing through him when Felix takes his cock in his hand and guides it to his hole. Felix teases it wide, the head of Sylvain’s cock spreading him in a heavenly burn, and Sylvain’s hands bury into his hips, bruise exquisite fingerprints as he’s holding himself back from thrusting up altogether. Sylvain truly is so, so good to him, Felix thinks, dazed from adoration, and decides to reward him in the best possible way.

Felix sinks onto him in one fluid motion, but it's the noise that leaves Sylvain's throat that sends stars shooting across his whole body, a high F major like the first note of his favorite song curling out of Sylvain through the score of his silhouette as his back arches like a musical scale, Felix’s ass sitting flush on his thighs but Sylvain trying to push deeper still. The fullness Felix feels coalesces with the fulfillment he experiences in proximity to Sylvain’s entire existence, an emotion close to completion that leaves him lost and loose and lovesome. He starts to lift his hips, the rim of his hole slowly dragging around Sylvain's length, but Sylvain's hands fly to his ass and keep him anchored there; Felix can see his expression, carved into lines over the work of art that's his face, and he knows Sylvain's doing his best not to come right here and now — so he tightens around him, clenches until a soft gasp leaves the both of them, until Felix can feel each of the piercings along Sylvain's cock etching their shape inside of him. The piercings will drive him crazy, he thinks as he starts swaying onto Sylvain; he feels them slide in and out along the soft push-and-pull of Sylvain’s hips into him, feels the chill of platinum warming up the longer he keeps Sylvain’s cock there, feels the smooth surface of the barbells caressing every spot inside him — the tip brushes at the perfect angle and Felix’s chest flushes with warmth, the color a perfect match for Sylvain’s hair as the fairy lights shine through the strands.

Sylvain’s expression is a smirk softened at the seams, and Felix wonders if Sylvain planned it this way, purposely withheld from fucking him before so that Felix felt everything ten times more intensely, a hundred times more addicting.

“Beautiful”, Sylvain whispers as he sits up and works Felix’s lips open with a kiss, breathes the word there like a treasured secret, fucks Felix in all the slow ways he’s fantasized about; it tears Felix apart, the absolute reverence that echoes along the syllables. It makes him lose his mind. It makes him lose himself.

“Fuck off,” he answers, but there’s not much bite to it, the sentence reduced to half a whisper in a near-broken voice, “don’t say that.”

“_Beautiful_,” Sylvain repeats as he pushes in at that perfect angle again, “beautiful,” he says as he curls Felix’s ponytail around his fist and _pulls_, pulls until a broken keen flumes from Felix’s mouth and Sylvain can laugh his next words through cutting teeth against his bared throat, “so fucking _gorgeous_,” he moans as he fucks deeper and harder into Felix, their bodies joined flawlessly together until Felix cannot know where he ends and Sylvain begins, and for a split-second Felix entertains the hopeless fantasy that whatever gods or forces of nature exist in this world, they've fashioned them exclusively for each other.

_Again, again, again_, falls like a chorus from Felix’s lips as he’s grasping at Sylvain’s shoulders, blunt nails just shy of scratching there when Sylvain kisses down the expanse of his throat and nips a mark there, an unuttered declaration of belonging the exact shade of Sylvain’s eyelashes, one that Felix sees reflected in Sylvain’s golden gaze when he admires his work. Sylvain’s hands wind around Felix’s waist and push him down into the mattress, pin him below Sylvain’s broad frame, and the mere instant Felix remains empty of everything Sylvain, he's on the verge of breaking down; Sylvain laughs, light and mirthful, as Felix curls his legs around his waist to try and push himself back onto his cock, Sylvain’s breath tickling Felix’s skin as he kisses along the ankle he settles over his shoulder before he pushes back in. _Oh, fuck, yes_, Felix almost shouts, low and raw, when Sylvain slams deep inside him, the drag of his cock along Felix’s hole torturous and electric when he pulls back and sinks in again, their sighs and groans harmonizing in the filthiest, most songful melody Felix has ever listened to.

“You think you can take it harder, my heart?” Sylvain asks like it’s even a question worth asking, like Felix is worth being handled with care and caresses, but Felix complies anyway, answers_ yes, harder, fuck me hard, fast_, and Sylvain lets go of his leg as he lies down against him and muffles Felix’s moans with his mouth, his cock hitting all the perfect places inside Felix until Felix thinks nothing and no one will ever feel quite as good. Sylvain lets out a swear when his pace becomes erratic, and Felix is overtaken with an urge to possess, to claim every bit of Sylvain; _do it_, he says as he traps Sylvain’s ass flush between his legs, _do it, come inside, Sylvain, please_, and when Felix crashes their lips together in the most inelegant kiss he can feel Sylvain’s release pulse deep inside of him.

Sylvain immediately slides down between his legs, and that’s when Felix remembers. He’d forgotten about the camera, but he can see it now, can distinguish Sylvain pushing his legs apart, can picture Sylvain licking his own climax from where some of it has dribbled between Felix’s thighs, and when he averts his gaze to look at the real thing, Sylvain’s smile is soft and satisfied like a concert’s swan song. “I told you you’d look so good like this,” Sylvain says as he gathers the seed spilling out of Felix onto his fingertips, “with my come dripping from your hole,” and when he pushes it back inside Felix and starts fingering him Felix almost passes out. The curl of his knuckles reaches exactly where Felix needs it to, brushes and pushes along his prostate until he’s left crying out, Felix raising his head only to see Sylvain curling his lips around the tip of his cock and sucking in time with his thrusts, Felix pushing deeper into his mouth half a dozen times before the heat-haze hits him and he comes the hardest he’s ever come.

Sylvain swallows almost all of his release, and licks what made it out his mouth right from where it’s dripped on Felix’s stomach, fluttering kisses onto the lines of muscle and the bare hint of soft chub Felix despises so much. Felix does not know when he’s started petting Sylvain’s hair, smoothing back the bangs that fall into his eyes so that he can look properly at Sylvain, at his—

Felix’s hand freezes into Sylvain’s locks, which Sylvain takes as an invitation to crawl up Felix’s body and press his naked shape against him, to kiss him again, softer and sweeter.

“So you’re my boyfriend, now?” Felix asks, sardonic still, although he expects Sylvain to deny, to say it was easier to explain this way, to tell him he was only joking.

Sylvain does not reply, and it’s somehow even worse; he merely tucks a stray lock of hair behind Felix’s ear, expression open and vulnerable and bleeding feeling like a fresh wound.

“Wait.” Felix knows a deflection when he hears one; he’s got a lifetime of experience in these. “Your camera was still on, right?”

Felix tries his hardest to act unconcerned, although it is becoming pretty hard with Sylvain’s fingers running through his hair like he’s never touched anything so precious in his life. He probably has, Felix thinks; his hands have certainly handled things and people a thousand times more treasurable than Felix’s split-ended hair and Felix’s spilt-over body. Still, just for a moment, Felix finds felicity in that pretense of pricelessness, curls closer against his chest. “It probably recorded some stuff, yeah.”

Sylvain laughs. “You could sell that for good money.”

“Shush.” Felix playfully punches him in the arm.

“I can already imagine the title — Sylvain Gautier Plows the Pale Ass of—”

“Oh my_ god_, shut up.” Felix playfully punches him in the arm, but harder.

“—the most amazing person he’s ever met,” he finishes as he carefully pins Felix’s wrist in-between them. Felix wonders if Sylvain can hear Felix’s inner voice screaming at him that he’s lying, that these are words he does not deserve, that he should stop saying these things before Felix starts to believe him and gets subsequently destroyed the day Sylvain realizes they aren’t true and leaves. Felix wonders if Sylvain can feel Felix’s heartbeat along the fingertips, can feel it thrashing about, possessed and frenzied and so much in _love_.

But for now, with each swipe of Sylvain’s gaze over every detail of Felix’s face, the inner voice recedes until it leaves Felix in blissful silence. “Look who’s talking,” Felix says, because he doesn’t know what else to say, because that’s the only thought inside his brain, because he’s always been told to tell the truth.

“I think I’m in love with you.” For an instant, Felix thinks he’s said it himself, before he realizes the clause has slipped past Sylvain’s lips to stitch over all the broken parts of him and patch him up at the seams.

Felix’s throat is so, so tight as Sylvain looks at him, irises burning and burnished bronze, adoration shining off every polished edge and melted particle. “You_ think_?” He asks, because he’s _known _for a little while, because a part of him knows he’s been in love with Sylvain before he’d even known what love was.

“Okay, let me rephrase that,” Sylvain says, the picture of patience, a glint of uncertainty fogging over his gaze before he wrestles it under control and takes Felix’s face in his hands. “I love you, Felix. I _know _I’m in love with you. I’ve wanted to tell you for a while. And— it’s okay if you don’t feel the same way, I just needed you to kn—”

Felix kisses him so hard their teeth are just shy of knocking together, kisses him like a fireflood, kisses him as though words won’t ever be enough to fully convey the extent of his feelings and the mess of emotions swirling inside him. He kisses him so he doesn’t cry, too, and when they part Felix buries his face in the crook of Sylvain’s shoulder and holds him, tight, so that perhaps if he cracks Sylvain’s ribs Sylvain won’t be able to ever take the words back. _Me too_, Felix says as Sylvain runs the tip of his nose along his throat and breathes deep, _I’m in love with you, Sylvain, I love you_, and when Sylvain kisses him again he lets his mouth take the shape of Sylvain’s bright, bright smile.

“So,” Sylvain speaks again after he’s spoken all of Felix’s feelings back to him in fleeting touches and deep kisses and whispered sighs, “boyfriends?”

“You do realize we’ve done everything backwards in this relationship, right?”

Sylvain hums in the crook of his neck. “Oh, Fe, I wouldn’t have it any other way,” and Felix can only think _me neither_ before Sylvain makes him forget to think all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so, so much for reading this whole fic and for sticking with it. Please tell me if you liked that ending, and tell me if you'd be interested in an epilogue - I'll write one if there's enough interest! (with a LOT of horny hehehehe)

**Author's Note:**

> you can entirely blame the sylvix discord and my horny braincell for this. trivia: i did tons of "RESEARCH" and found myself with: three sex livecams opened at the very same time, a 10-min convo between a camgirl and a dude talking only about their favorite beers, and 565$ worth of dildos in my cart on the bad dragon website.
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH for having read this filth and I hope you enjoyed!! Thanks to Cali and Daff for having beta'd my sin <3  
also: this WILL be multi-chapter, baby. next chapter is Felix POV. i'll take him for a RIDE.
> 
> hmu on twitter @akhikosanada and leave a comment if you liked it!!! :D

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tea Leaves and Sweet Dreams](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21318595) by [isamaar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isamaar/pseuds/isamaar)
  * [[Podfic] (they stare at me while i) crave you](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21359650) by [akhikosanada](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akhikosanada/pseuds/akhikosanada), [YeviePods (Yevie)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yevie/pseuds/YeviePods)


End file.
